


One Day, One Room

by TurnIt0ff



Category: The Book of Mormon - Ambiguous Fandom, The Book of Mormon - Parker/Stone/Lopez
Genre: AU, Addiction, Crying, Drugging, Forced Prostitution, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Lots of Crying, M/M, More Crying, Nightmares, Not Canon Compliant, PTSD, Prostitution, Sexual Content, Suicidal Thoughts, Super Sad Kevin, Super Sweet Connor, mcpriceley
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:14:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 12
Words: 85,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24598087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TurnIt0ff/pseuds/TurnIt0ff
Summary: "Connor studied him for a moment; the thin, frightened stranger who had stripped bare for him and crumbled to his knees at his feet, looking for all the world like he needed a hug and some sleep and for a human being to show him just a fucking ounce of compassion. This kid was in desperate need of a break, and Connor found himself in a position to grant him one."McPriceley AU: It's Connor's 21st birthday, and his 'friends' have surprised him with a night he will never forget.
Relationships: Elder "Connor" McKinley/Kevin Price
Comments: 207
Kudos: 166





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was one of those stories that just tumbled out of me without any warning. I have about 700 WIPs I should be tending to instead, but I'm giving you this instead. Heed the tags, as this is not going to be a Happy and Wholesome time for our boys. I hope the absolute chaos that has spilled out of my brain and onto paper can translate into something of an enjoyable experience for you.

It had started as a joke. Connor had been quite sure that it was never meant to spiral any further than that. Never dreamed that it actually would. Though, now, he was questioning why he would ever make the mistake of underestimating Steve and Eric’s propensity for the insane. Because it _definitely_ didn’t feel like a joke anymore as they dangled a hotel key in front of him, watching expectantly with twin, dopey smiles.

“You’re joking,” Connor said out loud, which only served to fuel whatever dumpster fire of amusement was flaming between them. “This is a joke.”

“Go see for yourself.” Eric gestured toward the door of their hotel room with a half-empty bottle of wine. “Room 304.”

Connor stared at the pair of them, slack jawed and entirely unamused. “You can’t be serious.”

He found himself wondering, for what had to be the millionth time, _why_ he had decided to keep their company. Well. That’s not exactly true. He didn’t have to wonder, because the answer was quite simple if not unsatisfactory. They had been a survival tactic. One that Connor had kept around far too long, he was quickly realizing. 

Their dads had been family friends growing up, so Connor was sort of grandfathered into the obligatory friendship as they grew up. _Friendship_ may have been a bit of a strong word for it, honestly, but Connor embraced it when he had reached high school and quickly learned that having certain mannerisms, certain interests or lack thereof, resulted in cruel teenage boys making his life a living hell. Unless, he just so happened to have an unlikely pair of giant, football-playing lugs flanking him in the hallway.

He couldn’t come up with much of an excuse as to why he kept them around after high school. Three years should have been plenty of time to cut them loose and find his own way in the world, maybe into a group of _real_ friends for once in his life, who actually understood him and liked the same things as him and could hold an intelligent conversation without their brains short circuiting. 

Bit of an unfortunate thing about that, though. Connor was never any good at making friends. 

“You thought we were just going to let you die a virgin?” Steve teased, throwing an absurdly heavy arm around his shoulders.

“Um, okay, well I’m twenty one, so,” he slipped out from under his hold, “I mean, I don’t think that’s such a ridiculous age to not… you know.” He averted his eyes, the tips of his ears burning hot under their snickering. “And anyway, it’s not like my dating pool is anywhere near the size of yours in the middle of rural Illinois.”

“Exactly. Hence the birthday gift, dingus.” 

“Wow. By any means necessary, huh? Is it really that urgent of a mission to abolish my virginity?”

Eric took a long drink of the bottle in his hand. “Maybe you can pull that stick out of your ass if you get something else _in_ it, you know what I mean?”

_Jesus._

“Yes. I know what you mean. Thank you for that.”

“Come onnnnn, Connor.” Steve shifted to another tactic, using his bright, blue puppy dog eyes against him. “We already paid for a separate room and everything.”

Connor stepped back and studied them carefully, his eyes narrowing. “You guys are bluffing. There’s no way you really went through with this.”

Steve simply smiled in response and wagged the key card for emphasis. Connor stared at it, then back at him, then back at the card before expelling an exasperated sigh. 

“Fine,” he caved. “I highly doubt there is anyone actually in there, but if it will shut you two up, I will go see for myself.” He snatched the key away from him and had a brief moment of pause before putting on a mask of defiance. “And, on the off chance there is someone in there, I’m telling them to go home.”

Eric smirked. “Wait until you see him. You don’t think we would skimp for your birthday, did you?”

“Only the best for our pal.”

Connor rolled his eyes. “You guys are crude.” He turned on his heel, ignoring their subsequent high-five as he walked out of the hotel room.

For all the vibrato he mustered for his friends, there was a very real part of him that fully expected to, in fact, find someone in that room. This would certainly take the cake, but it also wouldn’t be the first time those two had stepped over the line for the sake of a joke. The possibility dawned on him more and more as he made his way down the hall, and suddenly his hands were cold and clammy at the prospect that he might be about to walk into a room and meet a prostitute. 

A prostitute that was… here for him… with the expectation of… _stop._

It didn’t matter if there really was someone there or not, or if the person was here under the assumption that Connor wanted to… wanted him to…

 _Get it together._ There would be no prostitute. It was probably some stranger’s room key that they had managed to swipe for a joke and Connor would have some embarrassing encounter before walking back to the room so they could roast him for not calling their bluff. It would be fine. Everything was _fine._

But all the false confidence in the world didn’t stop his hands from shaking as he arrived at room 304. 

He stopped in front of the door, staring at the chipped paint below the numbers for a solid few seconds without moving or breathing. He turned over his left shoulder, then his right, scouting for onlookers before realizing how stupid he was being. He shook his head and pulled in a deep breath, raising a tentative fist to knock. _Wait._ He stopped short, remembering the key that was digging into his palm. It felt weird and invasive to try and enter a stranger’s room unannounced, no matter the seedy context that may or may not exist, and he wondered briefly if he should knock regardless. 

But if he knocked, he risked an embarrassing encounter with a stranger, whereas if he slid the key card in and it denied him access, he could slip away undetected and tell the boys that their prank had failed. 

_Jesus, Connor, just do something._

Without allowing himself another second to dwell on it, he inserted the key card into the slot, and his stomach dropped to his knees as the light flashed green. 

He clutched the door handle in a panic, turning it downward before it had a chance to lock up again. He stayed like that, frozen and squeezing the metal as he held his breath, listening for any activity on the other side of the door. After a moment of deafening silence, he took another deep breath and pushed in.

The room was darkened, save for the sliver of bronze streetlamp that shone through a thin slit in the curtains straight ahead. He stepped tentatively into the small corridor that separated him from the rest of the room, letting the door click quietly shut behind him. 

“Hello?” He called out, grimacing at the slight crack in his voice. “Is… is anyone there?”

“In here.”

Connor froze in his tracks as a small, soft voice carried in from around the corner, and his brain fired off flashing lights and alarm bells in an absolute panic. 

_Holy shit holy shit holy shit._ They hadn’t been bluffing. Those fuckers really just went for it. Connor felt a red-hot wave of… of embarrassment, or horror, or fear flush over him, setting his nerve endings on fire. There was an actual, real-life _hooker_ in his hotel room. Who was here for _him._

Okay. _Okay._ This was fine. This was great. He had known this was a possibility all along, and he had a plan. He… had a plan, right? Why could he suddenly not remember his plan, WHY WAS HIS BRAIN BLANKING OUT?

Right. He would tell this unsuspecting stranger that this had all just been a huge misunderstanding, a dumb prank by his friends that had gone too far once again, and that he was absolutely free to go on his merry way, sans Connor’s virginity. With this loose reassurance, he mustered the courage to round the corner into the bedroom, tapping the light switch on the wall as he did so. As soon as the room lit up, Connor let out an embarrassing yelp, jumping back to cover his mouth. And his eyes.

“You’re _naked!”_ He practically screamed through his fingers, turning his back to the completely nude stranger on his knees beside the bed. The boy remained still, seemingly frozen in place, and Connor’s voice plowed over him before he could come up with a response.

“You’re naked,” he repeated like an imbecile, his brain finding it difficult to cling onto anything other than that one jarring truth. “Why-- why are you _naked?”_

“I… I’m sorry, I thought…” The boy stumbled over his response, and it suddenly occurred to Connor he probably didn’t want to hear the reason behind it anyway.

“Gah, just! Put… put your clothes on,” Connor flapped a hand in his general direction behind him, feeling his face heat up even more. “Please.”

He kept his body turned toward the opposite wall to give him as much privacy as possible, and took the quiet rustle of cloth as evidence he was following his request.

“I’m sorry,” the stranger’s voice was oddly frantic as he redresed. “I’m sorry, I-- They told me to… to get undressed and wait on my knees, and I--”

“Who told you?” Connor cut him off.

“Your friends.”

Connor let his eyes fall shut, an involuntary groan escaping him. Of course they would have found some way to make this experience even more humiliating for him. He listened and waited as the stranger scrambled to pull his clothes on, sounding almost as flustered as Connor felt. Not that _that_ was even a remote possibility.

After the boy had gone still and quiet behind him, Connor opened his eyes but kept his hand fanned around them to guard his view. “Are you dressed?” 

“Yes.” The boy’s voice was even smaller than it had been before. Connor dropped his hand to his side and, with great bravery and determination, turned to him. 

That was when he got his first proper look at him.

His friends had been right about one thing and one thing only: he _was_ handsome. But frankly, that was the last thing Connor noticed. 

Perched on the edge of the bed, the hollows of his cheeks were sunken and nearing a purplish tint that didn’t hold a candle to the shade under his eyes. His hair, which might have been one of his most solid attributes on a good day, was flat and lifeless, hanging in stringy clumps around his narrow face. The clothes he had tugged over his body hung off his lanky frame, showcasing small rips and tatters in some places. Despite being probably about the same age as Connor, the way he sat with his shoulders hunched forward, arms wrapped protectively over his middle, made him appear much younger. 

None of these things stopped him from being attractive, necessarily. Connor could see that he was undeniably beautiful despite it all. But all he could focus on, all Connor could really see, was how absolutely fucking _miserable_ he looked. 

“I’m sorry,” the boy repeated when he met Connor’s gaze for the first time, wide eyes glistening up at him. “I’m really sorry, I was just doing what he told me to do.”

Connor nodded, trying to find his voice beneath the lump in his throat that had suddenly formed at the sight of him. “I know,” he said. “It’s okay, it’s… it’s not your fault. My friends are just… well. Actually, about that, there was a bit of a misunderstanding. I won’t actually be, um… needing your… services. Thanks.”

 _THANKS!?_ Connor squeezed his eyes shut, rubbing the back of his neck. What kind fucking idiot says _thanks_ to that!?

But when he opened his eyes, the boy hadn’t made a move to leave. In fact, he was stiff as a statue on the edge of the bed, his shoulders tense and one hand clutching lightly at his chest as he stared up at Connor with even wider eyes than before. He looked… petrified. 

“Please,” he whispered, “I… I’m sorry. I can… If this is about just now...” he gestured to the general vicinity of where he had been kneeling just moments ago as he stood from the bed and took a step toward Connor. “I, I can make it up to you.”

Connor stepped back, completely thrown by his words, and more urgently, the desperation with which he pleaded them. “What?”

“I’ll do whatever you want,” he said. Connor could physically see the tremors rolling through his body as the boy took another step, nearly closing the distance between them. “You... you can do whatever you want.”

“Wait. No, that’s--”

Without warning, the boy took one step closer before he dropped to his knees in front of Connor, a light _thud_ against the thin carpet. His trembling hands came up to fumble with his belt buckle and Connor’s eyes shot wide open. He nearly choked on his own swallow as his brain struggled to keep up.

“Woah!” He caught the boy’s thin wrists a little too easily in his hands as he got his bearings. He pulled them away from his pants and held them in midair between them. “What’re you doing?”

That’s when something seemed to break. 

Hands dangling limply in Connor’s hold, the boy’s head fell forward pathetically against his chest, a sob falling from his throat. Connor froze, never having been so unsure of how to react to anything in his life. He could feel the boy’s frail wrists trembling in his grasp but he felt like if he let go now, they might fall to the ground like dead weight and shatter. Instead, working on nothing but blind instinct and panic, he maintained his gentle hold and lowered himself slowly into a kneel. The boy was weeping so hard that his whole body shook, and he didn’t seem to notice when Connor was at eye level. 

“Hey,” Connor whispered, gently placing his wrists on the boy’s lap. He left them there, as Connor suspected, like he didn’t even notice. The only move he made was to curl forward on himself more now that Connor’s hold wasn’t forcing his body upright. “What’s wrong?”

The boy violently recoiled as Connor made contact with his shoulder, and Connor snatched his hand back immediately. The boy blinked hard, once, twice, as he gasped for breath, searching Connor’s face as if looking for some kind of anticipated reaction. In turn, Connor raised both of his hands in surrender, holding them slightly in front of him.

This didn’t seem to be the right move, because the boy dissolved into even heavier sobs, bringing his arms up to cradle himself. “Please,” he cried, pausing only to suck in a shuddering breath. “Please, I really need the money. I can’t… I can’t go back without it.” 

Connor sank back on his haunches, tilting his head in confusion. “Wait. They didn’t pay you yet?”

The boy shook his head, keeping his face bowed toward the carpet, far enough that Connor could see the notches of his spine poking out where his shirt gaped around his neck. “I’m supposed to get the money up front,” he whispered, his voice thick with shame. “I know better, but I… I messed up.”

“Listen, it’s fine,” Connor tried to break through to him without touching. “You’ll still be paid for the night, I promise. It’s not your fault my friends are idiots. I’ll even make them tip you extra for wasting your time.” He attempted a half smile but it faltered quickly as the boy continued crying. “Hey, everything’s gonna be okay. You can just take the money and enjoy a night off.”

“You don’t understand.” The boy shook his head, increasing agitation seeming to thicken in his posture. “I have to.”

Connor furrowed his brow. “You don’t have to do anything.”

With what appeared to be incredible effort, the boy lifted his head, meeting Connor’s eyes once again. They were impossibly more exhausted than before, all the light deadened from them. 

“You don’t understand,” he repeated weakly. “He’ll know.”

A sharp coldness prickled in the pit of Connor’s stomach. “Who will know?”

He looked away then, giving about the least comforting response possible. “It doesn’t matter.”

Connor studied him for a moment; the thin, frightened stranger who had stripped bare for him and crumbled to his knees at his feet, looking for all the world like he needed a hug and some sleep and for a human being to show him just a fucking ounce of compassion. This kid was in desperate need of a break, and Connor found himself in a position to grant him one. 

He rose to his feet, choosing to ignore the way the boy flinched at the sudden movement. Wordlessly, Connor trode to the door and flipped the metal deadbolt into place. When he turned back to the boy, approaching him slowly, his eyes were glued to him, wide and apprehensive. Connor sank to his knee once again, leveling with him. 

“What is your name?”

The boy blinked at him, his expression unreadable, so Connor tried again. 

“My name is Connor.”

The stranger hesitated for another moment before he cleared his throat. “Kevin.”

Connor smiled. “Kevin,” he repeated, “How would you feel about me paying for a whole night with you?”

Kevin froze for a moment before leaning slightly away, his eyes glazing over a bit. His look of hesitation borderlined on dread, and Connor was suddenly afraid he’d said the wrong thing. Perhaps he had taken it as aggressive, or maybe his locking the door had been interpreted as threatening, but he hadn’t meant it to be, really, he just didn’t want Eric and Steve coming in, because he was pretty sure they had an extra key and wouldn’t hesitate to use it if it meant making Connor’s night even more mortifying. 

But before he could spiral too far down that train of thought, Kevin nodded his head, his eyes lowered to the carpet. 

“Oh,” Connor said, pleasantly surprised by the response. “Good. Good, um. That’s great. So, I’ll… I’ll do that then.”

Kevin, keeping his eyes low, nodded again, his movements a little weaker this time. A thick, awkward silence hung over them as they knelt together on the cheap carpet, and the reality of his offer struck Connor when he realized he had no idea what to do next. He had never hired a prostitute for a night, or for any amount of time, for that matter. He didn’t really know the etiquette. And he felt sure that it might be different when there’s no actual intent of sex.

Suddenly, an idea struck him. One that probably should have occurred to him earlier, perhaps even the second he laid eyes on the boy. He pushed himself to his feet once again and made his way to the dresser beneath the television, rummaging through the books and pamphlets that were displayed on top of it. He shuffled aside the hotel-branded stationary and TV channel guide, finding the plastic-bound booklet he was searching for at the bottom of the stack. 

“Should... should I take my clothes off now?”

Connor spun around with wide eyes and the room service menu in hand to find the boy now standing, one arm crossed protectively over his middle to grasp his bicep. 

“What?”

The boy continued avoiding his eyes as he rubbed his hand anxiously over his arm. “How, um. How do you want me?”

 _Oh, God._ Something had been terribly lost in translation here. 

“No,” Connor shook his head, taking a careful step toward him. “No, no, no. I’m sorry I didn’t make myself clear. I don’t want to… have _sex_ with you.”

Kevin’s eyes shifted suddenly to his, the movement of his hand halting in place. “You don’t?”

Then it was Connor’s turn to avert his gaze, a deep flush creeping up his neck. “No, I-- I mean _yes_ I, I think you’re… it’s not that I’m not attracted to you, I think you’re beautiful, I just…” He peeked up just enough to see Kevin’s brows dipping in confusion. “You just… you seem like you’re not really into it, and I would never… I wouldn’t be into it if my partner wasn’t into it, you know?”

Somehow, he had managed to say the wrong thing yet again, because Kevin was looking at him with the same fear as he had shown just before he dropped to his knees. “I’m sorry,” he said again, “I can… I can do better, I’m just really tired is all, but I... I can be more into it if that’s what you want.”

Connor closed his eyes and took a cleansing breath, trying for once to make his thoughts as clear as possible. “I didn’t ask you to stay so I could sleep with you. That was never my intention.” When his fear didn’t lessen, Connor lowered his voice to a gentler tone. “I promise you, no one is going to touch you tonight.”

Much to his relief, Kevin’s posture seemed to relax just the slightest at his words, but his eyes were still full of apprehension. Connor couldn’t help but wonder, with a swift punch of nausea, just how badly people had treated this kid in the past. 

“What do you want me to do, then?”

Connor offered him a smile and held out the room service menu. “Well, for starters… are you hungry?”

Kevin’s eyes lifted from the booklet to his face, scanning over him warily, as if looking for some sort of hidden trick. Connor was quite sure the question was an unnecessary ask, as the answer was written all over him, in his sunken cheekbones, his sagging clothes, his tiny, frail wrists that Connor had felt wrapped in his fingers only moments ago. After another moment of skepticism, Kevin must have decided it wasn’t a trick, or perhaps he was just hungry and desperate enough to risk the humiliation if it was, and he nodded. 

“Yes.”

“Good. Pick out whatever you want.” Connor nudged the menu toward him again, gesturing for him to take it. Kevin obeyed his cue, but hesitated as his fingertips grazed the opposite end. 

“I don’t have any money,” he said, looking down at the booklet with something Connor could only describe as longing. 

Connor shook his head, pressing the menu into his hands. “It’s on me, silly,” Connor said, keeping his voice light despite the fact that this poor, sweet soul was breaking his heart with every word. “It’s the least I can do. Thanks to you, I don’t have to eat alone on my birthday.”

* * *

He told Connor he wanted the chicken soup and looked away, nodding, when Connor asked if he was sure that was all he wanted. When Connor took the menu back to place the order, he couldn’t help but notice that the chicken soup was the cheapest item on the menu. Suddenly, he decided he was feeling famished for a few extra appetizers that he wouldn’t _possibly_ be able to finish all on his own. After all, all the charges would be put on Eric’s card at the end of the night.

He knew he had made the right decision when the food arrived at their room and Kevin’s eyes grew unabashedly large at the sight of it all, gleaming with as much light as Connor had seen in them since they met.

They each claimed a separate bed, with a little uncertain hesitation from Kevin, and perched on the edges so that they faced each other, knee to knee across the small gap in between. Kevin shoveled large spoonfuls of his soup into his mouth, sipping and slurping without a care in the world. Connor felt guilty when he accidentally let out a small chuckle, because Kevin stopped mid scoop and placed his spoon down in the bowl, looking so embarrassed as he swallowed back his previous mouthful. “Sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be,” Connor told him, then hesitated a moment. “When was the last time you ate?”

Kevin shrugged one shoulder as he took another bite, slowly this time, keeping his eyes trained on his soup. Connor frowned, another piece of his heart breaking off. Wordlessly, he reached for the platter of wings and french fries he had sat on the nightstand beside them and held it out to Kevin. He took a single fry from the end of the plate with shaky fingers and Connor rolled his eyes. 

“It’s all yours,” he said, leaning forward to place the whole platter on the bed beside Kevin. “I might steal a fry or two, though, if that’s okay with you.”

Kevin stared down at the food in awe, placing the fry between his lips and chewing carefully. When he looked up again, Connor smiled at him, and _dammit_ if he didn’t nearly burst into tears when Kevin attempted a weak smile back. 

They ate their dinner mostly in silence, but Connor found that it wasn’t the uncomfortable kind of quiet he usually felt with new strangers. His anxiety generally nagged him to fill any empty spaces with sound for fear of coming off as awkward, but something was different about Kevin’s company. He didn’t feel like Kevin would think of him as awkward or weird or any of the other things Connor was used to assuming people felt about him. No. Kevin seemed… nice. And Connor kind of liked sitting in the quiet with him. 

By the time they finished eating, Kevin seemed to have relaxed marginally. The tension in his shoulders had lessened, though he still kept them hunched forward, as if protecting his body from some unforeseen threat. He snuck nervous glances at Connor every few seconds, and Connor dutifully pretended not to notice. It was clear that while the food may have been a small token of trust, it wasn’t enough to break down the barriers of defense this kid had clearly spent so long building. When Connor stood to clear away the dishes, Kevin shrank back at the proximity. Connor resisted the urge to say something. To reassure Kevin once again that Connor had promised not to touch him and he had every intention of following through. In the end, he kept quiet. He figured his word wouldn’t mean much anyway, and it would only serve to humiliate the boy over a reaction that wasn’t his fault. 

Connor had spent the majority of their silent dinner in a mental game of tug of war. First about whether or not he should make the offer he wanted to make at all, and then about how to possibly phrase it in a way that wouldn’t come off cruel and hurt Kevin’s feelings. That was the very last thing in the world he wanted to do. Without the buffer of food in the new silence that fell over them, Connor couldn’t put it off any further, and the words spilled out of him in a jumble. 

“Wouldyoumaybeliketotakeashower?”

If Kevin was offended by the sudden question, or if he even understood what Connor had said, he kept it well concealed in his unreadable expression, blinking up at Connor.

“Oh, my god,” Conor whispered after a beat. “Not like-- I don’t mean with… agh. Just, like. A shower. By yourself. Just you.”

Conor’s absolute mortification seemed to be lost on Kevin as he gazed up at him with nothing but gratitude and open relief. “Can I?” he asked so timidly, as if afraid Connor might change his mind.

“Of course! Please,” Connor said. “I mean. You know, whatever you want to do.”

“Thank you.”

Kevin wasted no time climbing off the bed and crossing to the bathroom. He stopped for just a moment as he reached the corner, looking back at Connor as if to say something more. Connor watched him patiently, giving him time to find his words, but after a beat he decided against it and disappeared into the bathroom. Once alone, Connor collapsed back onto the bed, letting a long sigh fall out of him. He hadn’t realized just how much of his own tension he was holding in his body until then. Not because of Kevin, exactly, but more so out of a desperation to _help_ Kevin, and a subsequent loss for how to go about it. 

It was clear to him that the kind stranger he had been acquainted with tonight was in a very bad way. If the physical state of him didn’t give it away, the constant fear, the aversion to touch, the inherent distrust in his eyes would have told the story. The severity of Kevin’s condition, of his mental state, was admittedly outside the realm of what Connor could really and truly fix. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t do everything in his power to offer relief in the small ways he could. 

When Connor was sure he could hear the water splashing unevenly against the shower floor, he stood from the bed crept up to the bathroom door, seeing that Kevin had left it cracked and choosing not to unpack the reasons behind that for now. He placed a tentative hand on the handle and brought the other up to shield his eyes in case Kevin was somehow exposed. After a moment of deliberation, he pressed in slowly, finding that Kevin was (thankfully) hidden by the solid white shower curtain and none the wiser to Connor’s entrance. Another mental game of tug-of-war ensued as he struggled with whether or not go through with his new plan. His eyes landed on his target, the neatly-folded pile of clothes he had left on the toilet seat. He paused for just a moment before decisively grabbing them up and backing out of the room.

Knowing he was working under a tight time frame, Connor sped-walked down the hallway clutching Kevin’s clothes in hand until he reached the communal washing room at the end. He tossed the t-shirt in the drum and thankfully had the forethought to feel around the jeans pockets for any loose item. He expected to find a phone, keys, maybe a wallet, but came out with none of the above. Instead, he pulled a worn-looking tube of chapstick out of the left pocket, and out of the right… _oh._ Three gold foil squares connected by perforated lines. Connor tucked them into his own pocket and tossed the jeans in the washer alongside the shirt. Buying a sample-sized tube of detergent from the vending machine on the wall, he started the machine and rushed down the hall for part two of his mission. 

Any doubts that Connor had ever held about the existence of a higher being were immediately quashed when he arrived at his original hotel room to find both Steve and Eric passed out in the dark. Perhaps miracles were real after all. There was a handwritten note lying on the dresser in front of him that read _“RIP CONNOR’S V-CARD,”_ but he would be annoyed about that later. Careful not to wake the sleeping giants, Connor rummaged through the dark until he found the duffle bag he had packed for the night away and snatched it up, only sparing half a glance back at the boys before rushing back to his room. 

He cut it way too close for comfort, but Connor managed to get back to the room in time to sneak a fresh set of pajamas onto the toilet lid before he heard the shower spray cut off. He even spared a second to drop Kevin’s belongings on his nightstand and grab a handful of cold fries from the plate. He collapsed back onto the bed, trying to look casual and pretend he definitely was not out of breath and maybe a little sweaty. There was a moment of silence from the bathroom and Connor held his breath. After a few seconds of no movement, he heard the door creak open and sat up to see--

Kevin. In a towel. Soaking wet. 

Connor swallowed hard, nearly choking on the piece of fry in his throat as he tried not to stare. Kevin appeared to be unfazed by whatever reaction Connor was struggling to suppress, and instead held up the wad of grey cotton pajamas, looking terribly unsure of himself. 

“They’re mine. For you,” Connor explained, making a conscious effort to keep his eyes above the spot on his collarbone where the water from his hair had begun to collect. “I hope you don’t mind, I uh. I put your clothes in the washing machine down the hall.” He prayed he wouldn’t take offense or think Connor was somehow making fun of him. Upon seeing the continued question in Kevin’s eyes, he added, “Oh, and don’t worry, I took out your, um… your belongings. They’re on the nightstand by your bed.”

Slowly, Kevin nodded, his eyebrows converging in the most adorable display of confusion Connor had ever seen. He stepped back into the bathroom, and when he reappeared a minute later, he was a little dryer than before, and looked almost like a brand new person. 

The thin, grey shorts had to be rolled several times at the waistband, and still they looked as though they might slip down his hips at the first unexpected jostle. The matching t-shirt hung loosely off his frame as well, but all faults aside, it made Connor’s heart seize up at the sight of him, comfortable and safe and _clean._

“Thank you,” he told Connor

“You don’t have to thank me for that,” Connor waved him off, but Kevin held his stance in a display of rare insistence.

“For the food, too,” he added, shifting his weight unsteadily on his feet, “and for… for being nice to me.”

How was it possible for this boy to keep breaking his heart when he was quite sure it was already shattered?

“You deserve to be treated with kindness,” Connor whispered. At this, Kevin just shrugged. 

Kevin remained standing in the small space between the beds, looking a bit uncertain about his next move. When Connor made no effort to direct him, he settled for the bed on which he had eaten his dinner, this time scooting back against the headboard and drawing his legs up to his chest. 

“I’m sorry for trying to touch you earlier,” Kevin spoke suddenly after a period of quiet, his voice soft and sincere. “It made you uncomfortable, and I… I never should have touched you like that without permission. It wasn’t right.” 

Connor squinted for half a second before he remembered the display of Kevin on his knees, pawing at his belt through tears. He turned to him, pushing back any selfish embarrassment he felt at the memory. 

“You were scared,” Connor said, “I don’t hold it against you, I promise.”

“Still. I’m sorry.”

“Do you…” Connor paused, chewed his lip. “Do you want to tell me about… whatever it is you were trying to say earlier? About someone ‘knowing?’”

Kevin closed in on himself again, angling his head slightly away. “I can’t talk about it.”

“Is there someone you’re afraid of?” Connor pressed gently, watching Kevin’s reaction for any signs of answers when he didn’t respond. “Maybe,” he added after a moment, “maybe I can help you?”

Kevin hugged his knees tighter. Connor could see the way his tremors had returned, even from several feet away. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” he spoke so quietly Connor almost didn’t hear him. “Please.”

The one, simple word, the sound of Kevin begging, sank like a rock in Connor’s stomach. As much as he wanted, needed to help him, he couldn’t bring himself to push him any further. 

“We can talk about anything you want,” he said instead. 

“How old are you turning?”

“Hmm?”

“You said it was your birthday,” Kevin clarified. “Which birthday?”

“Oh. Um, 21st.”

“Do you drink?”

Connor laughed. “No, I’m uh. I’m LDS,” he said. “Or, well. I was. Still am? Technically? I don’t know.” When he looked over, he found Kevin staring back at him with a glimmer of something dancing in his eyes. Connor chuckled again. “It’s okay if you think it’s weird. Most people don’t get the whole Mormon thing. Sometimes I don’t get it either.”

“No, I...” Kevin caught himself staring and pulled his eyes away again, fiddling with the pillow in his lap. “It’s just that, I was Mormon, too. Used to be.”

Connor had about a _billion_ questions to follow up, but something in the way he spoke, the careful avoidance in his eyes, his posture, told him to maybe ease back. Instead, he filled the charged silence with his own confession.

“I’m gay.”

Kevin’s head turned to him slowly. 

“Right, well. I guess you might have inferred that from the whole… my friends… buying your… services. Anyway.” he shook his head. “That’s why I’m not really in the church anymore.”

Kevin was quiet for a moment, then, “Earlier… you said your friends are idiots,” Kevin recalled. “They seem, um. They seem different. From you.”

Connor couldn’t help but chuckle at that. It would certainly be an understatement to say that, yes. “I don’t really have a lot in common with them,” he shrugged. “We’re definitely cut from a different cloth.”

“You don’t like them?” Kevin asked, and Connor was immediate, perhaps too immediate with his response.

“No,” he said, then quickly backtracking, “I mean, yes. It’s not that I don’t like them, exactly. We’ve been friends for a long time.”

Kevin nodded, bringing his eyes to his lap. “You’re nicer than they are.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers, I guess.”

“What do you mean?” Kevin looked at him, genuinely confused. 

There was no logical reason for Connor to feel safe to open himself to this perfect stranger, but something about his presence coaxed the words out of him with such a comfortability that he didn’t bother stopping himself. “I’ve never really had a lot of friends,” he started, drawing his legs up to mirror Kevin’s position on the opposite bed. “Growing up was… difficult, because of who I am. The way I acted and talked. It drew more negative attention than anything. But those two stuck around for some reason.” He paused, chuckling humorlessly. “Probably because I let them copy my homework for seven years straight.”

Kevin listened patiently as he talked, his eyes gleaming and genuine in a way Connor rarely saw in people when he spoke. He spent most of his conversations secretly worrying that the person he was talking to was just wishing he would shut up so they could walk away and carry on with their day. It felt… It felt nice to be listened to. So he kept talking. 

“I thought that things would be different when I graduated high school. I had this big plan of going far away to college, somewhere in New York City, where I would make all new friends. People who liked me for _me_ and who had similar interests and dreams and…” He trailed off, shrugging. “Well, life doesn’t always go the way you plan.”

He had a brief moment of horror as he realized who he was talking to, and that Kevin, of all people, was probably well aware of this concept. But Kevin didn’t look offended in the least. He looked… sad? But not for himself. For Connor. 

“Anyway, I shouldn’t complain.” He reined himself back into his usual forced composure, waving off the brief heaviness of the moment. “It’s better to have two kinda-shitty friends than no friends at all, right?”

For the first time in the night, the silence between them finally felt tense. There was an uncertain charge in it this time, likely sparked by Connor’s own embarrassment from the unexpected vulnerability, but then Kevin spoke again, and all the tension melted from the room in time with the air from Connor’s lungs.

“I can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to be your friend,” he said softly, then lowering his voice even further as he met Connor’s eyes. “I would be your friend.”

The purity of the simple sentence and the sincerity in his voice, his eyes, was nearly enough to bring tears to Connor’s eyes. The absolute whirlwind of an evening had already built to an emotional boil, Connor’s heart having been tugged and squeezed and shattered more than he had time to process, and it was a miracle he was able to keep the tears at bay as he smiled at the sweet, sweet boy across the room. 

“You would?”

Kevin smiled back, a little more strength behind it this time. “I would.”

* * *

It had taken some convincing to get Kevin to sleep. 

They continued to talk for quite some time, probably into the late hours of the night. Around one in the morning, Connor turned on the television for a little background noise to fill in the gaps in their conversation as their energy began to wind down. Kevin, to no one’s surprise, did not give much insight on what he wanted to watch, but Connor happened to catch a glimpse of something in his expression as he landed on Disney Channel to find the original Toy Story airing. He laid the remote down on the nightstand and smiled, watching Kevin’s eyes sharpen focus toward the screen, looking both younger and happier than he had all night. 

When Connor noticed Kevin’s eyelids starting to droop, his head nodding forward every few minutes before he would catch himself and snap upright again, he encouraged him to get some sleep. After all, that was the reason he had offered him a full night of pay. The kid was clearly in need of a break and a good night’s rest that it looked like he hadn’t gotten in months. But each time Connor suggested lying down and catching some shut-eye, Kevin would draw up into himself and politely decline, saying he wasn’t that tired. 

It sent a physical ache through Connor’s body to think that Kevin might have still been under some assumption that Connor would change his mind any minute about not wanting sex from him. He hoped that, at the very least, Kevin knew Connor wouldn’t even think of trying anything while Kevin was asleep. But then, he could only assume Kevin had every reason to be distrustful of strange men.

Eventually, though, he was no match for the exhaustion, and at Connor’s last gentle suggestion, Kevin slid down the bed and burrowed under the covers, finally, finally finding rest. 

When he was sure Kevin was asleep, Connor climbed out of bed and slid his shoes on, grabbing both his key cards as he headed down the hall. He retrieved Kevin’s clean laundry from the washer and decided he would hang them to dry by morning in their room. Before he headed back, he stopped in the hallway, casting a glance down at the room in which Steve and Eric were asleep. In a split second decision, he made his way to their room and snuck in quietly, carefully approaching the nightstand by Eric’s bed. He found his wallet there, just as he expected. 

He wasn’t sure how much they had agreed to pay Kevin for his services tonight, but he did know two things for sure. One, it probably wasn’t enough. And two, with Eric’s weekly allowances from his filthy-rich father, he certainly wouldn’t miss the cash. Feeling a jolt of rebellion for one of the first rare times in his life, Connor flipped open the wallet and pulled out a small stack of fifties and twenties. He shuffled through them quickly, counting just over two hundred dollars. He stuffed the folded bills into his pocket, hoping to God that it would be a meaningful amount to Kevin. 

Once back in the safety of his room with Kevin, Connor strung his wet clothes over the shower rod in the bathroom, spreading them out evenly so they would hopefully be dry by morning. Then, before leaving the bathroom, he pulled out the wad of money and tucked it into the back pocket of Kevin’s jeans. Hopefully, it would save Kevin any embarrassment of having to ask for it tomorrow. 

When he climbed back into bed, Toy Story was still playing, and Kevin was still sound asleep. Connor thought he probably wouldn’t be far behind him, but he found himself relaxing into the soft, familiar movie that he had loved so much as a child. As he watched, he pictured what Kevin’s childhood might have looked like. Perhaps not much different from his. They both liked the same movie. They had both been raised under the thumb of the same strict church. Somewhere along the line, their paths had diverged in a significant way. 

It was this thought that struck Connor the hardest. The thought that, had something gone differently in his own life, maybe even something small, he could have easily found himself in the same position Kevin was in. Had his parents not eventually, begrudgingly, come around to his being gay. Had he gone to New York with little money and lost it all to an overpriced education that he couldn’t afford. Any number of things could have landed him in the same boat. 

He didn’t know Kevin’s story. He didn’t know his past, or really even have a perfectly clear grasp of his present circumstances. But he knew that he was kind, and sweet. That he was frightened, and that he was fractured in ways Connor knew would not be easy to heal, and nearly impossible to do so without help. Connor knew, without a doubt, that he did not deserve what life had given him. 

As the credits began to roll across the screen, Connor wiped a stray tear from his cheek, shaking himself from his quickly spiraling train of thought. He let out a deep breath and looked briefly over at Kevin’s sleeping form before grabbing the remote and turning off the television. Just as he was about to click off the lamp and curl under the blankets, a small noise from beside him drew his attention back to the opposite bed. 

_”No,”_ Kevin whimpered, his head jerking back against the pillow. “No.”

Connor froze, staring helplessly at the boy who was clearly in the fits of a nightmare, unsure of what to do. He held his breath as he watched him, hoping it was just a fleeting thing and that Kevin would settle back into a peaceful rest. No such luck. Kevin jerked back again, this time with his whole body, and the sensation of being caught under a heavy blanket only seemed to fuel his panic even more. 

“No!” he cried, pushing wildly at the covers and rolling onto his back. “Stop!”

Connor scrambled out of bed, vaguely nauseated by the words coming out of Kevin’s mouth and just as unsure as he was a moment ago, but well aware he couldn’t just leave Kevin on his own. 

“Kevin?” he tried, leaning over his bed. “Hey, wake up, buddy. You’re just having a bad dream, that’s all.”

Kevin was having none of it. Connor’s sudden proximity must have triggered another onslaught of fear, because Kevin let out a loud sob and began striking out at whatever unforeseen force was tormenting him. One of his fists caught Connor’s chin and he yelped in surprise, bringing a hand up to cradle it. When Kevin’s erratic movements showed no sign of slowing, his arms flailing wildly and knocking into the headboard, the lamp, his own body, Connor knew he had to do something. Through his own rising panic, he reached out and grabbed ahold of Kevin’s wrists for the second time that night, suddenly hyper-aware of how fragile they felt in his grasp. 

Kevin jerked hard and fast against the feeling of restraint, his breaths coming quicker between cries. “Please, stop,” he begged, and Connor felt his knees buckle at the sound. 

“Kevin, sweetie, you gotta wake up,” he tightened his grasp against every instinct in his body. “Please, wake up. You’re okay.”

Finally, _finally,_ Kevin’s eyes sprang open and he stared up at Connor wide-eyed and hyperventilating, his whole body moving off the bed from the effort of his breathing. 

“Hey.” Connor tried to smile down at him, slowly releasing his wrists as he felt the tension begin to melt from his muscles. “It’s okay. You’re okay. It was just a dream.”

Kevin pulled in a few more ragged breaths, his eyes never once leaving Connor’s face. After a few seconds Kevin’s eyes began to fill with moisture, and as though there was no controlling it, because there probably wasn’t, they began to spill over quickly, one after another, accompanied by his gut wrenching sobs. Taking Connor by complete surprise, Kevin shot out both arms, clutching Connor by the shirt and pulling himself into his chest. He buried his face against the soft material and Connor could feel his whole body shaking as he slowly, carefully, raised his hands to rest on the boy’s back. 

“Shhh,” he whispered, dragging his palms over his back in long, repetitive motions, feeling every bump of his ribs and spine along the way. “You’re safe, Kevin, I promise. I’m here. I’m right here.”

Kevin began to cry even harder under his touch, falling apart completely in his arms, and Connor couldn’t stop the devastating thought from entering his mind: when was the last time Kevin had felt genuine human comfort?

When seconds bled into minutes with no sign of Kevin’s hysterics slowing down, Connor made a choice. A choice that he hoped and prayed to every god in the universe would not be misinterpreted to incite any more fear into this poor boy. Cautiously, and watching him for any signs of discomfort, Connor lowered himself onto the bed, bringing one leg up, then the other. He maneuvered forward with his arms never once leaving Kevin’s body, sliding in so that they lay side by side under the covers, Kevin’s head cradled into his chest. 

“Let it out,” Connor whispered, raising a hand to stroke through his barely-damp hair. “It’s okay, just let it out.”

And he did. 

Connor could only imagine the true depth of the trauma Kevin had endured in his young life, but he was sure the miserable, heartbreaking cries escaping his throat did not even scratch the surface of the pain he ached to expel. But still. Just as it had been all night, if Connor was able to provide even the smallest reprieve from a lifetime of horrors, that was exactly what he would do.

* * *

When Connor woke, it was to an empty bed. An empty room. He turned over his shoulder, the sheets falling away as he blinked the sleep from his eyes. He strained to listen for any sound coming from the bathroom, and when he found none, his eyes shifted to the nightstand. His heart sank. 

Kevin’s few personal items were gone. In their place was a single sheet of hotel stationary with a note written in pen, resting on top of a neatly-folded pile of borrowed grey pajamas. Connor felt his heart beating loudly in his chest as he picked it up.

_Connor,_

_Thank you again. For everything._

_For the first good memory I’ve made in a long time._

_I’ll never forget this._

_Happy birthday._

_Your friend,_

_Kevin_


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It has been brought to my attention that, perhaps, it was a bit mean to leave things as they were and call this a one shot. Also, if you've followed my writing, you know that this is hardly the first time I've caved into make a one-shot into a multi-chap, no matter how many active stories I'm juggling. SO HERE, YOU WIN, HERE'S A CHAPTER 2.
> 
> I've edited the tags & warnings, so please pay attention to those. This story has no plans of getting graphic or anything, but given the situation Kevin is in, there will be some dark stuff. This chapter included. It's grim. Thanks to everyone who had nice things to say about the first chapter and/or bullied me into writing more.
> 
> Bonus warning for using some variation of the word "fuck" 18 times in one chapter. Don't tell my mom.

His legs carried him faster than his mind could keep up with, the rust-colored carpet of the hallway blurring past him through a film of tears, but he couldn’t slow down. Connor could feel his heartbeat in his throat, hard and fast with anger, with fear with… fucking _outrage_ and heartbreak and god _damnit._ His key card failed on the first try, the little, red light mocking him, and he jammed the heel of his palm against the hard surface in frustration. It was fortunate, for both him and the hotel, that it worked on the second try, because he might have been compelled to kick down the door otherwise.

He didn’t exactly have a plan behind his charge, but adrenaline had taken the helm and was doing most of the heavy lifting. One moment he was pushing through the door and slamming on the lightswitch, and the next his fists were tangled in Eric’s pajama shirt, dragging him out of bed and shoving him, half-awake and startled, against the wall. 

“What the _fuck_ is wrong with you?” Connor shouted, inches from his face, his knuckles white and trembling.

 _“Me?”_ Eric easily pushed Connor’s hands away from him, taking a step forward. “What the fuck is wrong with _you?”_

Muscular discrepancies be damned, Connor was right back at him, planting two palms against his chest to shove him back into the wall and holding him there. “Where did you find him?”

“What’s going on?” By then, Steve had woken from the commotion, rolling out of bed to interject. Connor shot him a warning look over his shoulder, and he had the good sense, or perhaps just the amused curiosity, to stay back. 

“Where did you find him?” Connor growled again, looking between both of them. 

“Who?” Steve asked. 

“Who?!” Connor shouted. “The fucking _human being_ you bought for me as a fucking birthday present.”

In an absolutely _record-breaking_ failure to read the room, Eric had the audacity to laugh. “Planning the second date already?” He smirked. “Told you you’d like him.”

Connor McKinley had never punched anyone in his life and had no immediate plans to break that streak, but he had never felt more compelled to commit violence than in that very moment. He scraped his last threads of control together, tearing his tremoring hands away from Eric’s chest to take a step back and pull in a deep breath.

“You rented a fucking sex slave.” The words dripped like acid from his lips, burning his own insides as he spoke them. At this, Connor finally detected somewhat of a shift in their expressions, but they still didn’t seem to grasp the full gravity of what he was saying.

“What?” Steve crossed his arms over his chest. “What are you talking about? He was just a hooker, dude.”

“By _force, Steve.”_ Connor spun on his heel to face him directly. “He didn’t want to be there. He didn’t want to do any of that.”

Steve softened. “Woah, man, I swear we didn’t know that.”

“Why are you mad at _us?”_ Eric pulled his attention back to him. “You’re the one who fucked him.”

So much for Connor’s golden record of never hitting anyone. 

He didn’t register the pain in his knuckles until he saw the splash of red from Eric’s nose. His wide eyes blinked a few times, and he tensed automatically in anticipation of some kind of retaliation, but to his surprise, the next sound in the room was a bubble of laughter from Steve. When Connor turned to him, he wore a look of amusement and something like pride. 

“You just _hit_ me,” Eric said, more astonished than pained, which did, in fact, make Connor’s blood boil even hotter.

“Tell me where you found him,” Connor demanded, his voice low in warning even as it cracked under the threat of oncoming tears. “Now.”

“The same place you find any hookup in the twenty-first century.” Eric rolled his eyes when Connor only stared blankly at him. “Tinder, dumbass.”

“Show me his profile,” he demanded. Eric raised an eyebrow but reached for his phone anyway. Connor stepped closer so he could see as he opened the app, scrolling through his recent messages. 

“Don’t look, pervert,” Eric tilted his phone away from Connor’s prying eyes. After a few moments, he held the screen out to him again. “Here.”

Connor snatched the phone out of his hand, bringing it closer to his face. 

_LEO,_ the profile said. Connor looked up at Eric. “This isn’t him. His name isn’t Leo.”

“Maybe it’s his sign,” Steve suggested unhelpfully with a shrug. Both Connor and Eric looked up at him, dumbfounded.

“Why would a hooker include his zodiac sign, numbnuts?”

“He’s not a hooker,” Connor mumbled before raising his voice. “And this isn’t him.”

“It very much is, I assure you,” Eric said. “He’s the only dude in my matches.”

Connor narrowed his eyes and turned back to the screen, confused. The first photo was a vague, high-angled selfie with the head cropped out. It could have been Kevin, he supposed, but the photo was pretty low resolution and the loose-fitting, solid-colored clothes didn’t exactly have any distinguishing features. He tapped to the next photo and found much of the same. When he tapped again, he froze. 

The boy in the photo wore only a tight-fitting pair of grey briefs, strewn out over a bed, on his stomach. His face was angled pointedly away from the camera, but Connor didn’t need to see it to know. He recognized him immediately by the visible notches of bone that trailed a straight line down the middle of his back, the faint-but-detectable dips between his ribs. He held a visible tension in his arms, his shoulder blades, and even just looking at it, Connor could feel the memory of that same body pressed against his last night, those muscles tight and shaking from exhaustion, from the strain of crying, long after sleep had claimed him. 

He didn’t need to swipe any further to verify his identity, but he did, and he immediately regretted it.

The fourth and last photo was of Kevin on his knees, obviously naked but censored by the angle of the camera, which looked down on him from above. Only a sliver of his head was visible in the photo, cut off at the face, of course, but there was a stranger’s hand tangled in the messy brown hair, squeezing tightly. It didn’t take a genius to comprehend what was happening.

Suddenly sick to his stomach, he dropped the phone to his side, his free hand coming up to press against his mouth, his eyes squeezed shut. The burn of tears was inevitable now, along with the bile rising in his throat. 

The first sign of genuine empathy was detectable in Steve’s voice when he took a step toward him. “Connor, are you okay?”

Ignoring his question, Connor braced himself and brought the phone back into view, immediately clicking away from the horrific photo, even though it was already seared into his memory and probably would be forever. He swiped over to the message thread between he and Eric and scrolled quickly through the brief exchange. It was strictly business; flat talk of hourly rates and details for the arrangement, nothing to discern any kind of personality from the person on the other end. 

Without thinking, Connor pulled up the keyboard and began typing out a message.

“Woooah, slow down there, what do you think you’re doing?” Eric said. 

“I’m messaging him,” Connor responded without looking up. 

**_Kevin,_** he typed frantically, **_is this yofjasgnlb;;;;_**

He managed to hit send just before Eric snatched the phone out of his hands, their fingers jumbling the last word in the struggle. 

“Give it back,” Connor barked, grabbing for the phone, only to have it pulled infuriatingly out of his reach.

“No. Do this shit on your own account and leave me out of it,” he said. “If this really is… you know, what you said… I don’t want any part of that shit.”

Connor locked his jaw, resisting the urge to scream back that he already _was_ part of it. “I don’t have Tinder,” he said instead.

“So... download Tinder?”

For a real moment, Connor considered punching him again, but ultimately that would only result in another throbbing hand and it certainly wouldn’t do anything to help Kevin, and really, that was his singular focus now. 

“Fine,” Connor bit. “Just send me a link to his profile or something.”

“Whatever.” Eric looked down at his phone and swiped back over, but he snorted offhandedly at what he found there. “Sorry, bud, no can do.”

Connor raised his eyebrows, challenging him. “What the hell do you mean _‘no can do?’_ Just send it.”

Eric flipped the phone screen toward him, showing him the list of matches. The top spot where Kevin’s - _Leo’s_ \- profile had occupied only seconds ago was now replaced by a girl named _Callie_ with blonde beach waves and a heavy Snapchat filter. Under her, _Grace,_ and then _Emily_ and a whole line of women after that.

“He unmatched with me,” Eric shrugged. “Guess your morning-after text was a bit clingy for his taste.”

“No.” Connor’s voice shook, a raw, unfocused panic bubbling inside his chest. “No, no, no. That can’t- he can’t...”

“Dude, just take a breath,” Steve said.

“Get him back,” Connor cried, swiping his hands over his eyes. “Just… just match with him again, get him back.”

“That’s not how Tinder works, Con.” Steve, at least, had the decency to approach with a somewhat softer voice in the face of his obvious distress. Connor turned to him, eyes wide with disbelief, more tears spilling over his cheeks. 

“No,” he whispered. “No, you… you don’t understand. I _have_ to reach him.”

“Sorry, dude.” Eric shrugged, sliding his phone into the pocket of his sweatpants. “Nothing I can do about it now.”

Connor felt like he was in a dream. A nightmare. One of the nightmares where you screamed and screamed and nobody seemed to hear you or even care if they did. He was close to hyperventilation, images of the night before spinning through a vicious loop in his mind. Kevin collapsed at his feet in tears, wrists dangling limply in his hold. Kevin rail-thin in borrowed pajamas. Kevin weeping himself to sleep in Connor’s chest. 

Kevin on his knees in that _fucking_ photo. 

“Fuck you,” he growled, looking from Steven to Eric. “Fuck both of you.”

He didn’t hear a single word of whatever they bothered shouting after him. His only thoughts centered around the stranger who had, in the span of one night, ripped his heart out of his chest and shattered it to pieces without ever even meaning to. 

When he made it back to the empty hotel room, he only got as far as the nightstand where Kevin had left his goodbye note, clutching it in his hands before collapsing to his knees in tears.

* * *

It was nearly 9 a.m. when the car pulled up in front of the house; almost an hour after Kevin was due back. He gazed up at the rundown, two-story structure, swallowing hard as dread pooled in his stomach, slick and cold. The car rolled to a stop and he only allowed himself half a second to breathe in before pushing the door open and climbing out. He didn’t bother acknowledging the driver, who he would undoubtedly see later that evening, but he did feel the man’s eyes burning through him from behind as he made the agonizing walk to the front porch. 

If Kevin had thought he had it in him to pray after all these years, he would have chosen then and now to get on his knees. If there was any god out there in the universe with _any_ shred of love or compassion or even _pity_ left for him, they would let The General be sound asleep when Kevin entered. Stupidly, he clung to that fleeting hope as he turned the knob, pressing down as he pushed in to alleviate the squealing hinges as much as he could. 

The floorboard creaked under his shoe and he held his breath, guiding the door closed as quietly as he could. He winced at the soft click of the lock, every move, every sound amplified in the otherwise silent house. For a moment, he debated whether it would cause more or less commotion to try and slip his shoes off before heading for the stairs, but ultimately decided the less time he spent down here, out in the open, the better. All he wanted was to get upstairs, collapse into his filthy, torn mattress, and lay low until he was dragged out for his next call. 

He hoped James would be sound asleep by the time he got in, so he wouldn’t have to divulge any details of the surreal night just yet. It felt like a secret, his own little flame of warmth he protected inside himself that was entirely _his_ and no one else’s, in a world where he had ownership over almost nothing. He had meant everything he said in the scribbled note this morning; he would hold tight to the memory of his one, good night in a sea of so many horrible ones that all washed together in a blur of pain and suffering and misery that made up his life now, and maybe it would be enough to get him through one more. 

He crossed the entryway in three long strides and had one foot on the bottom step when his legs turned to stone. 

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”

Kevin froze. He clamped down on the wooden railing so hard he felt a splinter pierce the crease of his palm. The voice from behind him broke the dam that contained the rising tide of horror and dread, releasing an icy flood into his veins. His eyes fell closed in defeat. He knew the longer he hesitated to give him what he wanted, the worse it would be. But he allowed himself that one, small second to grieve. For whatever was about to happen to him. For the loss and official end of his one, good night. 

When he found the courage to turn around, the eyes that greeted him from the doorway of the kitchen sent a shiver down his spine. There was the ever-present glint of amusement he seemed to reserve especially for Kevin, but underneath, there was something darker; something angrier that made Kevin’s stomach twist in knots. He found it suddenly difficult to breathe under his gaze, but he didn’t dare look away. 

The General sauntered forward into the living room, his pace agonizingly slow, almost lazy. “I asked you a question,” he said. 

Kevin tried to swallow around the dryness, his tongue glued to the roof of his mouth. “Up-Upstairs,” he forced out, immediately regretting the word. He hadn’t meant for it to sound smart or sarcastic but the way The General's jaw twitched, a darkness flashing over his eyes, told Kevin it was too late for a retraction. 

“Without saying hello?” The General feigned betrayal, leaning against the far wall. “Come here.”

Kevin didn’t want to. More than anything, Kevin did not want to follow that simple command. He wished the filthy, splintered floorboards of the withering structure would finally just fucking crack under his weight and swallow him whole. Anything, god _anything_ to put some distance between him and the towering man watching him expectantly from across the room. But the choice was hardly his anymore, hadn’t been his for a long time, and any unspoken alternatives to _‘come here’_ hung heavy between them with the threat of more pain. Begrudgingly, as if selling off another piece of himself he didn’t know he had left, he walked forward. 

The General watched him the whole way, menacing eyes burning into his skin. Kevin came to a stop a few feet away, perhaps consciously or unconsciously, just beyond arm’s length. 

“I said, come here.”

 _Please,_ was the only thought that reverberated inside Kevin’s head, and he wasn’t even sure to whom he was pleading. He blinked hard, his breath going shallow and panicked, though he tried for all he was worth to hide it. _Please,_ he repeated the mantra over and over, useless and directionless, forcing one foot in front of the other, but his patience had run out, and The General closed the distance for him with a rough grip on his upper arm, yanking him forward. Kevin lost his footing, stumbling into the larger man’s chest before jerking back as much as the hold would allow. The General leaned down so that he was inches from his face, hot breath tickling his cheek, and Kevin forced himself to be still. 

“Where were you?” he demanded. 

“Client,” Kevin whispered. “He… he, um. Wanted an overnight.”

“And did he _pay_ for an overnight?”

Kevin nodded quickly, cringing back just slightly as the other man drew closer, lips brushing his skin. 

“So, where is my money?” 

With a trembling hand, Kevin reached for his back pocket, flinching violently when a second hand seized his wrist, holding it in place against his side. Hesitantly, he peeked up at The General, bracing himself for a blow, but the fingers around his wrist slowly uncurled with a silent, implicit order not to move. Then he traced, almost gently, up the side of his thigh, moving around to his back pocket. Kevin held his breath as the hand lingered in places he really wished it wouldn’t, sliding into his pocket.

“Good boy,” he whispered against his ear, pulling out the folded wad of cash.

Kevin stumbled back when he released him roughly, instinctively folding his arms over himself. He waited quietly, not daring to move until he’d been dismissed. 

The General unfolded the stack of bills in his hand and counted through them, one by one. Kevin had double, triple counted before he left the hotel lobby, and knew very well that Connor had given him more than what was required for an overnight stay. Still, he couldn’t curb the nervous energy in his muscles as he watched him count. 

He never held any expectation of receiving a portion of the tip, had learned that bitter lesson early on, so he was hesitant when The General counted out the last bill, flipped it between two fingers, and held it out for him to take. Kevin eyed the crisp twenty warily, his arms shaking at his sides as he willed his muscles to respond. Unwilling to prompt any further antagonization out of The General’s especially unsettling mood, he forced himself to reach for the offering, meeting empty air as the man suddenly flicked his wrist, snatching the bill just inches out of his reach. 

“What is your name?” 

Kevin’s outstretched hand wilted, falling back to his side. His mouth opened before he shut it again, fully understanding that this question was a trap, and helplessly unaware of how to navigate his way out. 

“What?” Kevin’s voice cracked. 

“It doesn’t seem like a hard fucking question.” His tone took a dark turn, the cat-and-mouse game they were playing seemingly coming to a terrifying head. “When you go out, to meet a client...” The General took a step toward him, and Kevin took an instinctive step back. “What is your name?”

A bomb erupted in the pit of Kevin’s stomach, his chest, his head, a new panic overtaking him completely. _Shit. Shitshitshit._ He had messed up. But how did he know? How did he _always know?_ He always found out, no matter what, and Kevin was an idiot for ever letting himself forget that, for ever letting himself slip up in the first place. He hadn’t meant to fuck up so badly with Connor, he really hadn’t. He had been so weak and hungry and so tired, still reeling from the fucking cocktail of drugs he had been given earlier that night and... and Connor was being so nice to him in a way no one had in a long time and-- Kevin took another step backward as he felt The General advancing on him, ice locking around his heart when his thighs met the back of the couch. 

“Answer me.”

“Leo,” he whispered, his eyes dropping to the silver tags that hung over the man’s chest to avoid his eyes, and then quickly away when he could practically hear the phantom clinking of metal, feel them tapping rhythmically against his neck and chin. 

To his surprise, The General stopped, leaving another foot of space between them. Kevin looked up when he chuckled, because _that_ was hardly the next thing he expected to hear, and saw that he had pulled his ‘work’ phone out of his pocket. 

“That’s funny,” The General remarked, almost casually. “I thought so, too.” He flipped the phone around to show Kevin a message thread on the screen. It took a moment, but his heart sank when he realized what he was looking at, fluttering wildly in his chest. “So, imagine my surprise when I woke up to this message from the client who booked you last night… _Kevin.”_

There was no controlling it. His breaths were coming in shallow pants, his knees buckling under him. If not for the arm of the couch behind him and the remnants of his first real calories in days in his body, he might have collapsed right there. “I’m sorry,” he gasped. “I-I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Kevin recoiled as the phone blew past his head, grazing his ear before landing on the couch behind him. The General’s hand was in his hair, body pressing tightly against his, trapping Kevin between him and the couch. He yanked his head back, forcing Kevin to look into his eyes, the muscles in his neck straining taut. 

“What the _fuck_ were you trying to pull, you little piece of shit?” He growled, all hint of amusement gone from his eyes. 

“N-Nothing.” Kevin tried to shake his head, crying out as the fist at his scalp pulled tighter. “Nothing, I swear, please-”

“Don’t fucking lie to me,” he spat. 

The burn behind Kevin’s eyes was enough to make his vision swim, but he fought with everything he had to keep it contained, knowing that crying would only make it worse. 

“That was quite the tip he left you.” The General loosened his fist slightly, that flicker of amusement finding its way back among the darkness. “Did you make a friend? Is that it?” he mocked, letting his free hand wander. “You wanted your little fucking boyfriend to know your name?”

“No,” Kevin whispered, shuddering under the touch. 

An involuntary yelp escaped him as The General suddenly drew back and cracked the back of his hand across Kevin’s face. A sharp ringing overtook his hearing and his palm rose instinctively to cover the source of the hot pain under his eye. He only had a second to recover before two large hands grabbed the collar of his t-shirt, yanking him upright and ripping. He tore the fabric effortlessly down the middle and Kevin let it happen, flinching as each tear pulled against his skin with bruising force. When it was completely open, he ripped it the rest of the way off his shoulders and spun him roughly so that his back was flush against his chest. Kevin didn’t resist. Only when his face was out of The General’s line of sight, did he allow the tears to spill over. 

A possessive arm snaked around his waist, the other hand gripping his jaw harshly, thumb digging into the hollow of his cheek hard enough to leave a bruise. “Looks like you could use a reminder of who you belong to.”

Kevin didn’t fight as slow fingers undid the button of his jeans, curling around the waistband and yanking them down to his knees. He heard the faint clatter of plastic against hardwood as his chapstick fell out of his pocket, and he watched helplessly as it rolled across the floor, disappearing under the couch. It was the last thing he saw before a strong hand on his spine forced him over the back of the couch, and Kevin bit down on the ratty, old cushion to keep quiet. 

When he was finished, Kevin stayed slumped over, tremors wracking his body as he listened to the faint clinking of metal behind him. Beyond his closed eyes, he felt something light fall against the cushion beside his face. He waited until the heavy thud of boots retreated from the room before he opened his eyes to find the discarded twenty dollar bill. Kevin Price had never felt so cheap.

* * *

Connor’s eyes were starting to glaze over, deep into his second straight hour of swiping. 

He’d been at it on-and-off for three days. Obsessively. During class. Between customers at work. At night, in bed, his sleep-heavy eyes scanning for the elusive _“Leo”_ profile he had seen three days prior and hadn’t stopped thinking about since. 

If he let his mind wander too far, his deepest fears might have convinced him that the profile had since been deleted entirely, that it was Connor’s fault for sending that message in the first place, and that Kevin was probably being punished for _his_ careless mistake. He would never find him, then. He would never see him again, but, undoubtedly, he would never be able to forget him. He couldn’t let himself think like that. He couldn’t bear the thought of it, and the heavy weight that settled on his chest at the possibility was not productive for anyone, least of all Kevin. All he could do was keep swiping. Keep hoping. 

So, he did. 

He manually edited his location, and changed the distance preferences to include most of the greater Chicago area, including where their hotel had been on his birthday. The profile he’d created for himself was deceitfully vague, but necessarily so. He’d had plenty of time to think it over, his mind working tirelessly to piece together the dreamlike fragments of everything that had transpired that night. The details of the situation still eluded almost entirely, but if Connor’s interaction with Kevin told him anything, it was that he was up against something more sinister than the sheltering walls of Connor’s cozy, rural life had prepared him for. 

Kevin had been wholly, devastatingly terrified of something, of _someone,_ in particular, to the point of a brokenness that Conor had never seen before. Whoever they were, whatever it was that kept him imprisoned by fear, they had their hooks planted deep, and the reach of their power even deeper. If Connor was going to go anywhere near this, he needed to proceed with caution. For both their sakes.

He didn’t exactly have much of a plan yet. It was more of a cross-that-bridge-when-he-came-to-it type of fervor that kept pushing him forward. Admittedly, most of his efforts thus far had been fueled exclusively by an intense and profound sadness; the one that wracked his entire being every time Connor remembered the feeling of that frightened boy sobbing into his chest. But that was enough. More than enough.

The familiar burn of frustration tinged his senses as his eyelids began to grow heavy against the harsh blue light of his phone, his mind and body losing the battle to sleep. The burden of guilt was enough to suffocate him long into his nightmares every night, even with the promise that he could, and would, start swiping again as soon as he woke up. It all just felt so helpless; the idea that his only chance of tracking this boy down was left to an endless game of chance on this stupid, fucking _dating_ app, meanwhile Kevin was being subjected to god-knows-what by god-knows-who for god-knows-how long. 

Connor pinched his eyes shut, willing the moisture to alleviate the dry fatigue. _Ten more swipes,_ he promised himself. _Ten more swipes, and then he would sleep._

He flipped over onto his back, holding the phone at arm’s length above him to put some distance between his eyes and the screen. It was getting harder and harder to concentrate on the blur of names and faces as they swiped by under his thumb, one after another, counting down from ten. _Tyler. Michael. David. Thomas._ He yawned. _Stephen. Andrew. Leo-_

Leo.

_Leo._

_LEO._

Kevin.

“Fuck!” Connor jerked back into the pillow as the weight of his phone smacked into his bottom lip, but he didn’t even register the pain, scrambling to flip over the fallen device, painstakingly careful not to accidentally swipe it away. 

There he was. Right in front of him. The same headless, cropped photo of a rail-thin boy in jeans and a t-shirt, that, at this point, Connor would have recognized anywhere. He clutched the phone, inches from his face, his heart thrumming wildly inside his chest, because he had finally done it. After three long days of tearing himself inside out with guilt and worry and soul-crushing anxiety, he had _found him._

Any shred of exhaustion was immediately forgotten as he pushed himself upright against the headboard, staring down at the image on the screen. He tapped the photo once, clicking over to the second one he had seen on Eric’s phone before, just to verify, beyond a shred of a doubt, that it was him. But he stopped there. He remembered all-too vividly what the following images held, his stomach lurching at the thought, and was desperate to avoid ever seeing them again. 

He did, however, scroll to the written part of the profile.

_**P2P ONLY. $$$. Discreet. You message first.** _

A quick Google search told him everything he already knew. P2P - Pay to Play - felt like a cruel mockery of a hunger-panged stranger on his knees, eyes full of tears and terror and unspoken desperation like Connor had seen that night. He read _discreet_ in the frightened voice of the boy who had begged him not to turn him away, under some vague, crushing threat that _‘he would know.’_

It was the _he_ in question that had Connor’s thumbs shaking as they hovered over the screen. It was obvious that the boy he had met was not the person running this account. Connor may not have known many details in this surrealist nightmare of a situation, but the one thing he knew for certain was that Kevin was not doing this of his own volition, and if he had to guess, he probably had very little control over his… arrangements. 

Bearing that in mind, along with the knowledge of how very insane and dangerous and perhaps even hopeless this was, he held his breath and swiped right. 

What was probably less than a second felt like an eternity before a colorful graphic swept across his screen. A photo of Kevin, stamped with three bolded words. 

**_It’s a Match._ **


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hiiiii, turns out I'm not dead. I'm back to work now so my writing is probably going to be significantly slowed down, but I'm so happy to be posting again, and I assure you I have not given up on any of my current stories. Thank you to everyone who is reading any of them, and for all the nice words that have been thrown my way. They make my life so much brighter. 
> 
> I would say overall, this one is a bit lighter than the last chapter, though admittedly that's not hard to beat. That being said, there's not a ton of lightness is this Kevin's life (at the moment), so expect the usual shitty-ness of all that.

_A tinny thump from the dumpster startled him. Kevin looked up to see a rail-thin alley cat balancing precariously on the edge, its spine curved in a perfect arch. Fresh rain soaked his matted hair - both the cat’s and Kevin's. Even sheltered beneath the overhang of the brick building behind him, the wind carried bits of the spray onto his huddled form, a cool mist that countered against the sticky, summer air._

_“Hey, buddy,” Kevin called up to the stray. The cat watched him with a tilted head, freezing at the sudden awareness of his presence. Kevin smiled. “It’s okay, I’m not gonna hurt you.”_

_Maybe the cat found something trustworthy in his voice, or maybe, more likely, he was drawn to the half-eaten tuna sandwich on his lap. Either way, he bounded down from the lip of the dumpster in a graceful leap, landing on silent paws next to Kevin. He kept a safe and skeptical distance, his pink nose twitching as he sniffed him out. Slowly, carefully, Kevin extended a hand, palm up and fingers softly curled. After a moment of indecision, the cat took a step closer, stretching his neck forward. The tip of his nose bumped against Kevin’s index finger and jerked back before realizing that the strange man wasn’t going to cause him any harm. Still, he hesitated._

_Kevin looked down at his soggy sandwich, the first meal he’d seen in nearly two days, and got an idea._

_He swiped his finger along the edge of the crust, collecting a bit of the tuna mixture on the end. Even more slowly than before, he held the offering out, smiling as the bait worked its magic, drawing the cat closer. A tiny sandpaper tongue poked out, cleaning his finger in two swipes. Kevin chuckled, forcing down a swell of sadness at the thought of Mittens, his own cat back home. Back… well, not home. Not anymore._

_Kevin could have thought about how Mittens used to love when he would sneak him bits of human food, but that would mean having to think about his mother and the way she would scold him for it. Back when Kevin’s greatest act of defiance was a stray sliver of cooked salmon under the table, when he was still, in the eyes of the people he cared about most, a good kid. That was before he had shattered the illusion with the sharp and heavy truth, bringing down the only life he had ever known in one fell swoop._

_“You want more?” Kevin asked, already scooping another clump onto his fingertip. “You look hungry, little guy.” His suspicions were confirmed when the cat licked his finger clean._

_He was going in for scoop number three when something changed in the stray’s posture, his wiry little muscles tensing as he crouched low, ears perked. It took Kevin an extra second to register the sound of approaching footsteps in the alley, but by the time he did, his new friend had already sprung himself onto the nearest ledge, clearing the next jump onto the dumpster and onto his next adventure. Kevin let the scoop of tuna fall to the pavement._

_He wiped his hands against his jeans before taking another bite for himself, fully aware that any amount of sanitation was an illusion. It wasn’t as if he could let something as simple as cleanliness stand between him and a meal. Not when he couldn’t guarantee where his next would come from, or when._

_He would be hungry by the time he found out, though, because the second thump against the dumpster was nowhere near as light as the one before, and he dropped the remaining half of his sandwich onto the wet ground as he jumped at the sound. When he looked up, the rain had lightened up just slightly and there were three men standing in a semi-circle over him, their intentions unclear but not entirely unreadable. Kevin tensed, feeling like he had suddenly switched places with the alley cat. He was the one on the defensive now, and he had a feeling things wouldn’t work out so well for him._

_Of course, he was right._

_Aside from the occasional tiff with Jack when they were little kids, Kevin had never been in a physical altercation of any sort. Somewhere beyond the panic of trying to wrap his head around what was happening, Kevin found it within himself to be genuinely shocked at just how much it hurt to be hit on purpose. To be hit with the intention to do genuine harm. He could do little else as a means of defense other than curl his body in on itself, trying to shield his more vulnerable parts from the worst of the blows._

_It didn’t last long, he didn’t think. It was hard to tell when time became measured only by how much of it he had to suck in a breath between kicks to the rib cage, blows to the head. Eventually, he felt a hand reach into his pockets, one by one, presumably looking for something of value that simply didn’t exist. A small wad of what Kevin was pretty sure was three crumpled dollar bills was all they could take. Three dollars was the price he paid for his first beating. He hoped it would be enough to make them leave them alone._

_Kevin groaned as another boot came in contact with his back, unable to scream when his lungs felt like they were deflated altogether. He curled in tighter on the ground, preparing for another inevitable onslaught, when another voice added to the mix. A new voice, different sounding than the cruel ones above him, a little further away. The new voice drew closer. Kevin could make out some sort of shouting through the echo of the falling rain that muffled all other sound around him, and then the worst of the pain halted. Was he dying? Was this what dying felt like? Had they killed him for three dollars and a laugh? He couldn’t open his eyes to find out._

_Not until a soft hand touched his face. He jerked back._

_“Hey.” The voice was quieter now, gentler, dipping into his personal space. “Are you okay?”_

_Kevin dared to peer up from behind his defensive arms. The man who had stopped his assailants looked to be about Kevin’s age, kneeling in front of him with shaggy, blonde hair and green eyes. He wore studded, black bracelets on his wrist and an assortment of piercings over his ears and nose. One on his eyebrow, too. Something in Kevin’s mind supplied that he looked like the type of person that would attract all the wrong attention in his tiny Indiana hometown. Someone his own family would turn their nose at. But he was being kind to Kevin now._

_“I don’t…” Kevin swallowed, bringing his hands up to cover his ribs. He winced at the contact. “I don’t know.”_

_The stranger flipped a stray swoop of hair out of his eyes, concern lacing his pierced features. “Do you think you can stand?” He was already extending a hand to help him up, but Kevin shrank back, shaking his head._

_“I don’t have anywhere to go.” He wasn’t sure why he said it. What it meant for his current situation or why this man would care. But it was true. Even so, a part of him regretted when the look of concern flickered to something more like pity._

_“A hospital, maybe?” His voice was light, almost teasing, as if trying to take the edge off of genuine concern by padding it with humor._

_Regardless, Kevin shook his head again. A hospital would ask too many questions, like why a newly eighteen-year-old kid was out on the streets of Chicago without a dime to his name, like where his parents might be in all of this. And all of that was as if he could even afford it. As if he had more than three - scratch that, zero - dollars to his name._

_“Well you can’t stay here,” the boy sighed, tilting his head down at Kevin. It reminded him of how the cat had looked at him just minutes before. The boy looked behind him, over his shoulder at the door where he had presumably walked out from. Kevin could make out the muffled sound of music from behind it, loud and heavy, like some sort of drums and guitars. Maybe he had come from a concert. After a moment, he looked back at Kevin, pressing his lips together, then nodded decisively. “Alright. You’re coming home with me.”_

_Kevin blinked. “What?”_

_“Just to get you cleaned up. You don’t have to stay,” he said, then smiled. “But you’re welcome to, for the night. If you want. I think the rain is supposed to carry on for a while.”_

_Kevin struggled to push himself into a sitting position, using the side of the dumpster as leverage. “You don’t even know me,” he said. Something about the stranger’s kindness was almost as off-putting as it was comforting._

_A dazzling smile pulled up the corner of the boy’s mouth, tugging a black studded piercing with it. “Well, that’s a simple fix,” he said, extending his hand again. This time Kevin took it, hesitantly. “My name is Dominic.”_

* * *

Kevin lay on his side, knees drawn up to his chest as tight as he could manage. He didn’t know how long he had been lying there, but he knew it was only a matter of time before the latch on the other side of the door would shift open, and he would be forced up and out, into whatever arms awaited him that evening. For now, he let his eyes slip out of focus against the chipping, sage paint on the wall beside his thin mattress, losing himself in the only semblance of peace he would get today. 

He found that his thoughts kept centering back around the night of his last overnight call; something he usually tried hard to forget. Then again, there was nothing _usual_ about that particular night. 

The memories swelled to life inside of him, the unfamiliar warmth they summoned putting him on edge just as much as they pulled him back from it. He couldn’t stop thinking about him: the red haired stranger who had given him food with no expectation of repayment, in any form, and lent him soft, clean pajamas to sleep in. Who had allowed him to sleep at all and cradled him to his chest when he woke up crying. The warmth of the memories were quick to ignite into a burn, recalling the deep grief he had felt in that moment, even then, knowing that the compassion he was being shown was only temporary. That it would be gone as soon as it came, in the dreamlike way that it had, and would only serve to harden the impact of the eventual fall.

He had been right about that. 

Something about his interaction with him, with Connor, had brought about a distinct anger that Kevin thought had long ago died in him. Not for Connor, but for himself. For eighteen-year-old Kevin Price who, regardless of his circumstances, had put him on this path less than a year ago, and for nineteen-year-old Kevin Price who had failed, time and again, to escape from it, instead burrowing himself deeper into the thorny tangle, letting himself be caught and consumed and trapped. Each bed. Each stranger. Each pill. 

Connor was a personified representation of everything Kevin _could_ have been, of what his life could have looked like had the domino effect not been triggered quite so drastically and spiraled out of his control so fast. It was difficult not to look back and regret each small decision he had made along the way, wondering if he had chosen differently, even once, then it could have veered him away from where he was now: lifeless on a thin mattress, his lower half throbbing in tune with his heartbeat, mentally steeling himself for another bad night in an endless constellation of so many others. 

Connor was _good._ Connor was kind. He was innocent. And Kevin? He was ashamed. Deeply and truly. The sum of a collection of miseries that clung to him relentlessly, unshakable, unwashable despite his dying efforts. So many handprints forever seared into his skin. So many men who had taken his body without any regard for the person trapped inside of it. He felt certain he could never come back from that. Even if he was granted a physical release from the life that imprisoned him - a hope he had long ago abandoned - he knew that he would never _truly_ be free. And worse, maybe he didn’t deserve it. 

Perhaps that had been the driving force behind his decision to sneak away from the hotel that morning, knowing full well he could have been walking away from the first - and maybe last - open door he had seen in nearly a year. It had been an excruciating decision, but one that hadn’t taken much time at all to make. One look at the sleeping redhead next to him, so soft and perfect and peaceful against the clean, white linens was all it took. No exit route, no matter how alluring and filled with promise, was worth taking if it meant even the slightest chance of dragging that innocent boy into the fire with him. 

Kevin could live with a lot, as the past year of his life had taught him, but he could not live with _that._

He had only just managed to close his eyes when the inevitable creak of the door woke him. He didn’t have the energy to flinch at the sound, but his eyes dragged open, dull and lifeless against the wall. 

“Get up.”

For a moment, just a moment, Kevin indulged in the thought of what might happen if he were to give into his instinct to defy the order. To lie there, playing possum, looking as dead as he felt on the inside. He would definitely be hurt. Maybe he would even piss him off enough to finally kill him. The fleeting flutter of relief at the thought of that possibility terrified Kevin deeply. It was enough to kill his hypothetical resistance, pushing him up so that he sat on the edge of the bed, keeping his eyes low. 

“Another overnight call.” The General’s voice was cruel and mocking. “Somebody’s popular this week.” 

Kevin tried not to let his despair present openly, but the feeling of dread was instant and immense, twisting his insides. From across the room, he felt James shift uncomfortably on his mattress. He kept his eyes on the filthy crevice between the floorboards as heavy boots thudded toward him, only looking up when a thick finger hooked under his chin. The General pulled a smirk as his eyes traced over the bruise under Kevin’s eye, bringing a thumb up to prod the yellow-purple skin. Kevin winced as he pressed in, provoking an even wider grin.

“I trust you’ll remember how to behave this time,” he taunted. Kevin nodded as much as he could with his chin still in his grasp. After a few endless seconds trapped under his gaze, he released him and stepped back into the doorway. 

“Up. Both of you,” he barked. “The driver will be here in fifteen, don’t make him wait.”

The door slammed shut behind him, and James waited until he heard his footsteps retreating down the stairs before he shifted to the edge of his mattress, eyes trained on Kevin. 

“You okay?” he asked softly. 

Kevin nodded, even though they both knew it was a lie. Overnight calls came with an unspoken threat of misery in one form or another, with the rare exception of the night he spent with Connor, which he was smart enough to realize was a once-in-a-lifetime instance. Kevin had all but written off that night as nothing more than a dream. It might as well have been, and honestly, it was safer to think of it that way. Dreams were fake, Kevin knew that, and the better he remembered that, the less likely he was to get his hopes up. He wasn’t sure he would survive another fall like that. 

“Maybe it won’t be one of the bad ones,” James offered weakly. 

“Yeah.” Kevin tried for a smile. “Maybe.”

* * *

_The thump of the bass was so heavy it reverberated through Kevin’s ribcage, burying itself into his bones, his body, making his heart beat in time with the music like it was a part of him. A red light pulsed from the ceiling, feeding him dreamlike glimpses of the room around him; a sea of sweaty bodies through a hazy, neon glow. Drinks raised and spilling over tangles of uncaring limbs. The borrowed, black t-shirt clung to his sweaty skin until it cut off right above his navel, all prior feelings of self-consciousness over his exposed midriff washed away in the alcohol coursing through his system._

_Warm hands found his waist from behind, and a pair of familiar, chapped lips dragged over his neck. Kevin let his head fall back heavy against a solid shoulder, and arms wound around him, pulling him back, hips and legs and bodies pressed and moving together. A jovial laugh bubbled out of Kevin without his permission because it all just felt so fucking_ good.

_He felt alive._

_He was warm in all the right ways, in ways he didn’t even know he could be, a slow, steady burn trickling up from his chest; a seed planted by his first shot of amber liquid and nurtured by every shot after. Sweat covered every inch of his body, hair clinging to his face in sticky, wet clumps, but Dominic didn’t seem to mind because he’s just as gross and sticky in the most appealing way that made Kevin push his hips back against him instinctively._

_“You feel good,” the blonde-haired boy murmured against his ear, making goosebumps erupt over his skin. He spun Kevin around so that they were facing each other, and Kevin let his eyes fall shut as he lost himself in the music once again, his weight mostly held up by the other boy at this point._

_“I feel good,” he agreed smoothly, and he could almost make out the sound of Dom’s laughter over all the noise._

_“I have something for you.” He drew Kevin in closer and leaned forward to whisper against his ear, making him shudder at the heightened sensation. Everything felt so much_ more _like this, so much better, and he didn’t ever want it to ever stop._

_A finger tapped twice on his bottom lip and Kevin opened his eyes. There was a tiny, white pill pinched between Dom’s pointer and thumb, presented inches from his face. Kevin had to blink hard a few times to make his eyes focus._

_“One for each of us,” Dom said. He popped one into his mouth from his other hand and swallowed it dry, then gestured for Kevin to take the other. For the briefest moment, a sharp peck of clarity tapped against the foggy glass that encased his brain. Kevin knew a bad idea when he saw one. Even if he had crossed about a thousand lines already that he never thought he would, this particular thing felt a bit far beyond his threshold for rule-bending._

_“I don’t know,” Kevin shrugged, snaking his arms up and around Dom’s neck and shoulders, an affectionate gesture to somehow cushion the rejection. He was already having fun. He would have liked to stay just like that, how he is then, but Dom was smiling so close to him, little kisses peppering his jaw, his neck, and it felt so nice, and_ Dom _was so nice, and he wouldn’t ever do anything to bring Kevin harm, right? He had been the one to take Kevin in after finding him in the alley that night. He had been the one to bring him home and clean him up. He had given him a place to sleep for three weeks and clothes to wear and the first sense of trust he had been able to feel since climbing onto the night bus just outside of Indianapolis almost a month earlier._

_Besides, Dom had taken the pill, too, right? It couldn’t be that bad._

_“Please?” Dom purred against his skin. Kevin could feel the vibration more than he could hear the word. “I don’t want to come down yet. I want to feel like this with you for as long as I can.”_

_Somehow, in the moment, Kevin couldn’t argue with that._

_The finger that had tapped at his lips only seconds ago was back, this time pushing gently in between his lips to place the pill at the back of his tongue. Dom closed his mouth over Kevin’s and kissed him hard and deep until he felt him swallow. His eyes were alight with satisfaction when he pulled back. Maybe if Kevin hadn’t been so far gone, he would have noticed the small-but-detectable glimmer of something else there, too._

* * *

He could tell something was off as soon as he stepped out of the car. 

An overnight call almost always meant a wealthy client with too much cash to spare, and some ritzy hotel penthouse to show for it. Kevin had come to expect luxurious high-rises along The Loop with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the lake, and instead he was standing in front of a cheap motel off the beaten path, red, neon letters glowing off the side of the brick corner. 

“I’ll be in the alley at the end of the block at eight o’clock,” Marcus, the driver, spoke through the crack of the driver’s side window. “Don’t be late.”

Kevin nodded once without looking at him and closed the car door. His hands shook at his sides, flexing and unflexing unconsciously as he approached the building. Part of him regretted not taking James up on his offer to let him have his extra pill to get through the night. Another part of him wondered how he could still find it within himself to still feel this nervous after so many times. He had no way of knowing what kind of situation he was about to walk into, only that he was walking into ten straight hours of it. 

He kept his eyes low as he passed through the lobby. If the night shift desk attendants ever had any suspicion of what he was, they never said anything. At the very most, he had been on the receiving end of some weighted stares, either of pity or condemnation. He didn’t know which one stung worse, so he preferred not to look at all. It didn’t matter in the long run, he supposed. 

Once he was on the elevator, he uncurled his palm to look at the smudged ink he had scrawled there earlier. _412._ He hit the button for the fourth floor and kept his eyes fixed on the glowing number above the doors as it dinged past each one. When the doors opened, he took a deep breath and forced himself out into the hallway. 

He allowed himself to hope that maybe the client had at least sprung for the usual bottle of champagne - or even better, some kind of hard liquor - that he had come to associate with overnight gigs. The little white pill the General had left for him on the bathroom counter wasn’t doing nearly enough to combat his unease.

Room 412 was at the end of the hallway. Kevin swallowed hard as he came to a stop in front of it, closing his eyes for just a moment before forcing himself to knock. It never did any good to try and predict what the night would hold for him, but still the images flashed behind his eyes anyway; faceless figures in his memory, fragmented pieces of men in tilted back leather passenger seats and hotel beds, strung together with drugs and alcohol and loathing that spiderwebbed out in every direction. He had come to expect a few constants that he could generally rely on from client to client, especially for someone who paid for an entire night, so was nearly knocked backward at the sight of the man who opened the door and defied every expectation he could have ever held. 

_“Connor?”_ he breathed.

The familiar man in front of him gripped the door as his eyes landed on Kevin. “Hi.”

His eyes were just as kind as Kevin remembered them being, his skin just as beautiful and his hair just as strikingly brilliant, but all of it was stamped out by the sudden, panicked alarm bells ringing sharp in his head of _trap trap trap it’s a trap it’s a trap._

He took an unconscious step back, further into the hallway. “What… what’re you…?”

Connor held the door open with his shoe, raising his hands in a placating gesture. “Look, I… I know this probably isn’t what you expected.”

 _What was he doing here? Was this a setup? Was he a_ cop _or something?_ No. That didn’t make any sense. But neither did the fact that he was standing here now, in this shitty motel, in the room where Kevin was directed to meet a client who had paid for a night of his services. 

“How did you find me?” Kevin whispered, trying to force down the slight tremor in his voice. 

“I haven’t stopped looking for you. I--” he broke off suddenly, poking his head out into the hallway and looking both ways. “Can you... Do you want to come in so we can talk?”

The effects of the drugs were starting to kick in, probably triggered by the sudden surge of adrenaline and disorientation. His limbs felt heavy, his mind wading through a thick sludge, both of which kept him planted firmly on the faded carpet. 

“Kevin?” His voice was softer this time, beckoning to him. “Please?”

Suddenly, the idea of resisting felt entirely too exhausting to consider. The drugs were doing exactly what they were intended to do: keeping him docile, pliable, making him _behave._ He shivered as he practically felt the word in the General’s voice whispered in his ear, as if he was right there behind him then. _Behave._ His client had given him an order, and Kevin had learned the hard way the consequences of saying defying that. His shoulders slumped forward, giving in to the pull of the chemicals in his veins and the voice in his head that urged him forward.

The chill from the air conditioning hit his skin immediately as he entered the room and he wrapped his arms around himself, rubbing his palm over his exposed bicep as Connor closed the door behind them. 

“Are you cold?” Connor asked, already moving across the room to switch off the unit. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Kevin answered automatically. He kept his posture rigid, still incredibly unsure of what was really going on and instinctively keeping his distance. There wasn’t any part of him that believed Connor had any desire to hurt him, but he had made the mistake of trusting kind men before. 

In the light of the hotel room, the bruises on Kevin’s face from The General’s assault must have been more apparent than they were in the hallway, because Connor’s eyes fell to the one just below Kevin’s cheekbone, his lips parting in horror. “What… what happened?” 

“I messed up.” It was true, and it was the simplest answer.

“What does that mean?” Connor pressed. 

Kevin shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Kevin, you’re being _hurt._ Of course it matters.”

Kevin almost couldn’t hold back the absurd laughter that rose like bile in his throat at the thought of a black eye being the extent of the “hurt” he had suffered that night. Any night.

“It was my fault.” Kevin let his eyes slip shut for a moment, refocusing them on the carpet when he opened them again. “I’m not supposed to use my real name with, um… with clients. I know I’m not supposed to. I messed up.”

Connor’s silence hung heavy between them and he swallowed so hard Kevin could hear it. “You’re supposed to go by Leo,” he said flatly. Kevin nodded. “The message I sent…”

“It’s not your fault,” Kevin stopped him, forcing his eyes up to meet Connor’s. “You didn’t know.”

“He… they, whoever it… You got hit because of me.”

 _More than hit,_ his mind supplied. “Not because of you.”

“How bad is it?” Connor twisted his fingers nervously in front of him. “Everywhere else?”

“Not bad,” Kevin lied, thinking of the finger-shaped bruises on his hips, on his shoulders and neck that hopefully Connor couldn’t see peeking out the top of his t-shirt. He didn’t need to know all of that. 

Connor looked like he was going to be sick. “Kevin, I… I’m so sorry. I really am.”

“I’m okay.” Kevin tried his best to sound convincing, because something about seeing Connor’s face twisted in guilt made his stomach hurt, and he genuinely wanted to fix it. He shifted his weight, picking at the hem of his shirt. The pill in his system was making his brain foggy, and he still had so many questions but his tongue felt like it was glued to the roof of his mouth. “What are you… Why did you look for me?”

When he dared to look up, Connor blinked at him, almost as if he hadn’t yet fully considered the answer to that question himself. 

“Because...” Connor twisted his hands in front of him, looking almost as uncertain as Kevin felt to be here. “Because you clearly don’t want to be doing, um… well, _this._ I can see that you’re in trouble.”

Kevin’s heart thudded inside his chest at the sudden feeling of being painted into a corner. “No,” he shook his head. “No, I… I’m fine.”

Connor took a step toward him and Kevin stepped back on instinct. Connor stopped immediately.

“Kevin,” he spoke softly, “look me in the eye and tell me you are here because you _want_ to be.”

He couldn’t do that. When he did look him in the eye, it was through a blur of tears that teetered on the edge, threatening to spill over. “Please,” Kevin whispered. “You don’t understand, okay?”

“I know.” Connor placed his hands over his chest, shaking his head earnestly. “Trust me, I know there’s so much I don’t understand here. I’m asking you to help me understand it so I can help you.”

“You can’t help me.”

“You don’t know that,” Connor pleaded, thankfully keeping his distance. “We could go to the police. I’ll go with you.”

Immediately, Kevin’s eyes sprang open. He took another step back, stopping when his back was forced into the wall behind him. He shook his head quickly, the combination of the movement and the drugs settling into his system making him dizzy. “No. No no no, you can’t-- you can’t do that.”

“You won’t be in trouble. What you’re doing isn’t your fault--”

Panic took over before he could even finish his sentence. Kevin launched himself off the wall, slipping past Connor and toward the exit. He didn’t know what he would do or how he would make up the money he was skipping out on from Connor’s overnight call to bring to the General. All he knew was that whatever happened to him tonight would be much better than what happened to him last time he had been careless enough to be caught by the police. 

“Wait!” Connor threw his body in front of the door as soon as Kevin reached it, his arms stretched out wide, and Kevin flinched back, genuinely startled. Connor seemed to read his reaction immediately, a flash of regret passing over him as he dropped his arms to his sides. But he didn’t move away from the door. 

“Sorry,” Connor spoke quietly. “I’ll, um. I’ll let you… I mean I’m not going to, to hurt you, or _keep_ you here, I just...” He paused, his eyes scanning over Kevin’s face with a desperate look that almost mirrored his own. He let out a long breath. “No cops. Okay. I can work with that, I promise, just... Please, don’t go.”

Kevin blinked, his chest and shoulders moving with the labor of his breathing. He forced himself to look into Connor’s eyes and found the same genuine concern he had seen the first time they met. It was almost enough to bring him back from the edge of panic. Almost. “What do you want from me?” he whispered, a naked vulnerability in his own voice that he hated but couldn’t seem to hide. 

Connor’s eyes widened slightly, a twinge of sadness spilling over into the shock. “Nothing,” he swore, placing both hands over his heart again. He moved to take a step closer to Kevin in his urgency to explain, but stopped short when he shrank back. “I don’t want anything from you, I swear. I...” He lowered his eyes from Kevin’s, bringing them back with an even deeper sincerity than before. “I just want to give you a break. That’s all.”

A break. 

Kevin stared at the boy in front of him, searching his face for… something? For similarities to a face he hadn’t seen in nearly a year, yet thought about almost every day. For all the signs and signals he had missed along the way before, the last time he made the mistake of trusting a stranger. Sure, Connor had been good to him before. But so had Dominic. 

There was one distinct difference, however, separating the past from the present. Last time, his mistake, his trust, had cost him everything. This time, he had nothing to lose. The realization stung almost as much as the one that followed: that it wasn’t a matter of whether or not he could trust Connor after all, because really, there was no choice at all. Not for Kevin. No matter Connor’s intentions, whether they were sincere or otherwise, he was Kevin’s client. He had paid for a night, a full one, with Kevin, and so his fate was decided the minute the door closed behind him. And really, long before that. 

So, he would stay. He had to stay. Best case scenario, he would get a break, as Connor had promised. Worst case… well, Kevin was sure it was nothing he hadn’t done before. 

Dropping into a familiar resignation like an old, worn-out pair of shoes, Kevin lowered his eyes somewhere just below Connor’s chin and swallowed.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll stay.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again to everyone who continues to read this and say such nice things. This idea originally came so out of nowhere and I was never sure if it would carry beyond a first chapter, but I'm so glad I have y'all on board because I've grown quite attached to these characters and this story. 
> 
> VERY special thank you to rrratchie on Tumblr for some INSANELY kind and amazing fan art he made for this story, and honestly helped me get over the bump of writer's block I've been having lately. He is incredibly talented and so fucking sweet for doing this. You can see it here:
> 
> https://rrratchie.tumblr.com/post/626211522663874560/this-is-the-third-time-ive-attempted-these-two


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Listen, I realize my update schedule, or lack thereof, is a shit show. I know this, and I'm sorry, but here I am with chapter 4. This story lives in my head rent free 24 hours a day, though, and I have so much of the future stuff planned and written out in little drabbles, so you can rest assured that the rest is coming. Eventually. I really did not expect this story idea to develop the way it has in my mind, but I'm really, really enjoying writing it, so I hope that comes across well to you guys. As always, I love hearing your feedback. There's nothing I love more than discussing my sweet, sweet boys. Enjoy!

Connor was trying not to stare. 

A tense silence hung between them as they kept their distance on opposite beds, a mirror image of the positions they had found themselves in last time, in a much nicer hotel room, on a much nicer side of the city. He had just barely managed to talk Kevin into staying after the near-panic attack in the entryway, and now that he was here, Connor felt pretty clueless about how to proceed. He had been so consumed with the idea of getting him here, of just finding some way to see him again, that he hadn’t managed to think much beyond that. 

He tried to keep his eyes on the plate of half-eaten finger-foods in his lap, or the strip of peeling wallpaper just above the television, or the mystery stain on the duvet cover. _Anywhere_ except the fading swirl of purple beneath Kevin’s eye. Every time he caught a glimpse of it, Connor’s insides curdleded with guilt. Kevin had insisted it wasn’t his fault, but really, intentions aside, it kind of was. He may not have a very firm grasp on what kind of situation Kevin was in, but that much he was fairly sure of. 

He was glad he had made the conscious decision to order food before Kevin arrived. He had gone back and forth on whether or not he should wait, so he could pick out what he wanted from the menu, but Connor had a feeling he would only scan for the cheapest item on the menu as he had before. Instead, Connor went a bit overboard, ordering six different items from the appetizer section, figuring Kevin was sure to like at least one of them.

Still, the boy on the opposite bed barely touched his food. It was a stark contrast from the way he had devoured every bite Connor had put in front of him last time. Kevin had been poking around the same chicken finger for several minutes, picking tiny pieces off to place between his lips, his eyes unfocused in the direction of the plate, only breaking away to shoot Connor the occasional, fleeting glance. 

The situation had very obviously put Kevin on edge. There was a certain apprehension in the way he looked at Connor, or perhaps _watched_ was a better word, as if he were waiting for Connor to do something or to give him some sort of order or direction. The sting of hurt beneath his skin felt absurdly selfish, but he had really hoped that after last time Kevin would have been able to trust him, at elast a little. The more rational part of him understood that keeping things like _trust_ guarded close to his chest was probably the safest way, the only way, for Kevin to survive. 

He just wished there was something he could say to reassure him that there was no hidden agenda at play here. Whatever else the kid had been subjected to, in other hotel rooms, with other strangers who had bought his time, there was no expectation of the sorts in this one. Not with Connor, not ever. 

But he couldn’t find a way to communicate that. Especially when Kevin appeared to be only halfway in the room, anyway. 

Hesitantly, he let his gaze slip over to him, hoping that Kevin wouldn’t choose that moment to glance over and catch him gawking. But he barely seemed to notice Connor was there at all now. Heavy, half-lidded eyes blinked twice in slow motion as he traced a fingertip idly along the edge of his plate. Something about his posture appeared lax, almost lazy, as he rested against the headboard, knees drawn up to his chest, but not in any way that comforted Connor. If anything, the lack of visible tension only conflicted with the obvious panic he had seen just minutes earlier, and he didn’t miss the lingering trace of a tremor in his hands as he wiped his palms against the denim of his jeans. And if he looked close enough, which he really tried not to, he could almost make out that Kevin’s pupils were blown to nearly the size of his irises, wide and dazed behind his glassy expression. 

“Is the food okay?” Connor asked, his voice clipped, a bit higher than usual, desperate to fill the weighted silence between them. 

Kevin blinked again, his head turning slowly, almost mechanically, in Connor’s direction. He nodded, keeping his gaze just below Connor’s chin. 

“It’s good,” he said, picking off a small piece of chicken and placing it in his mouth as if to emphasize his point. “I— thank you. You didn’t have to get me anything.”

Connor’s eyes involuntarily fell to the dip of Kevin’s t-shirt where a pale, sharp collar bone poked out, far more pronounced than it should have been. Images of his hungry, empty eyes and the way he had shoveled spoonfuls of soup into his mouth invaded his memory and he blinked them away, bringing his eyes back to Kevin’s. 

_Yes,_ he thought, _I did._

“Don’t even worry about it.” He waved him off, his hands feeling awkward and heavy at the ends of his wrists. He wished he knew what to do with them aside from twisting them nervously in his lap. God, why did he have to be so fucking _awkward?_

He had been the one to arrange the meetup in the first place. Maybe that was what had him more high strung than usual: the unwavering awareness of his own captive audience. The fact that he had summoned Kevin here with no say of his own, and now he didn’t even know what to do with him. It hardly seemed like a kind favor to force someone to come sit in a tense silence with him for ten hours. 

When it seemed like Kevin had eaten all he was going to eat, Connor collected their plates and boxed up the leftover food, taking extra care to make sure Kevin saw him put it in the mini fridge beneath the television, in case he got hungry later. He gently closed the door and turned back to face him, hands worrying at each other at his waist. 

“Just so you know, I don’t… I don’t expect anything of you while you’re here.”

Kevin shifted his eyes to the side before bringing them back to Connor. “Okay.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t, um… You know, I should have like, brought something for you to do, or... I don’t know. I guess I didn’t really think that far ahead. I was mostly just focused on finding you again and just… getting you here.”

The only response was a barely perceptible nod, and a slight shift in position as Kevin hugged his knees tighter to his chest. Connor watched him for a moment, once again observing the hazy, far-off look in his eyes. He didn’t want to acknowledge what the more logical side of him recognized as some sort of obvious intoxication, nor was he ready to unpack any of the thoughts that accompanied that. 

“Anyway, um. All that to say, just… make yourself at home.” He swallowed around a nervous chuckle, gesturing at the room around them. “Well, as home as you can feel in the shittiest hotel in all of the greater Chicago area.”

At this, Kevin offered him a lopsided smile, the gesture looking like it cost him far more effort than it should have. “It’s not so bad,” he spoke slowly, focusing hard to shape his mouth around each word. 

“Is there anything you want to do?” Connor asked. “The TV is all yours. You can put on whatever you want, or--”

“Can I…” Kevin’s tentative voice stopped him, blinking hard before he got the rest of his words out. “Can I take a shower?”

Connor’s mouth popped open, a thought smacking into him like a train. “Oh, my gosh. Yes! Of course, I, I meant to offer and then I got distracted, but I even-- hold on.” He held a finger up to Kevin, turning in a frazzled circle until he spotted his duffel bag on the armchair in the corner. He crossed the room to unzip it, rifling through his belongings until he found what he was looking for, and then turned around to present it to Kevin. 

“Here,” he said, holding out a long pair of black-and-red flannel pajama bottoms and a soft black t-shirt to match. Both of which would likely be large enough for him to swim in, but Connor couldn’t resist bringing them along after last time. As small as it was, this was some small bit of tangible comfort that Connor could offer. “I remembered it got chilly at night last time, so I brought something a little heavier for you to wear. I have some thicker socks, too, if you want them.”

Kevin shuffled to the edge of the bed, bringing his feet down to touch the floor. 

“You brought those for me?”

A sudden trickle of heat crept up the back of Connor’s neck, filling in the tips of his ears. “Well, I-- yes. You don’t have to wear them, obviously, if you don’t want to, I just thought...”

“That’s, um… that’s really thoughtful,” Kevin said, standing. “Thank you.”

Connor’s blush rose even hotter at the earnest affection in his voice, the intensity of his gaze on him, and once again he wished he hadn’t been cursed with the world’s most humiliating case of social ineptitude. Aside from that, he couldn’t quite understand what it was about being in this boy’s presence that had every nerve ending in his body on high alert. 

“Yeah, of course. You’re welcome.” He shuffled forward, meeting Kevin at the end of the bed to hand off the bundle of fabric, not quite meeting his eyes. “Just… you know, take your time.”

Kevin nodded, once, and Connor sank down on the edge of the bed as he made his way to the bathroom, forcing himself not to watch the boy as he went. He closed his eyes and let out a breath, feeling some of the nervous tension slide out of him as the spray of water started up. He was rolling his shoulders, trying to work out the knots from a stressful start to the evening, when he heard the creak of the door, and Kevin appeared around the corner, his shirt discarded and clutching a towel to his chest. Connor swallowed hard.

Before he could ask if everything was okay, Kevin was the first to speak up, his voice laced with a forced firmness even as he kept his eyes on the carpet.

“Why did you pay for another night with me?” He asked. “Really?”

Connor frowned, turning his body to angle toward Kevin. 

“I meant what I said before. You just… you deserve a break. A night you spend with me watching Disney movies and eating mediocre chicken wings is one night you don’t have to spend…” He cut himself off with a hard swallow when Kevin’s eyes closed briefly. “Um. Somewhere else.”

“I-- Okay.” Kevin’s brows drew together, something like frustration pinching his features as he struggled to explain himself. “But _why?_ I mean, why do you care enough to want to give me that? To give me _anything?”_

Connor was silent. Did he have an answer to that? Was it any good? Would it be enough to say that it was all just because he was a decent person and Kevin presented him with an opportunity to do the right thing? 

Was that even the whole truth?

He thought of the way Kevin had taken up residency in his mind in the past few days, showing up nightly in his dreams, haunting his every thought in the daytime as he struggled through class and long shifts at the diner. He thought of the handwritten note Connor kept sealed away in the hardcover book on his nightstand; the one he read and reread every night until he was able to find him again.

“I don’t know,” he finally answered, meeting Keivn’s eyes. “But I do.”

* * *

Connor awoke to the red glow of the alarm clock staring back at him from the nightstand. A sleepy groan hummed low in his throat at the display of the ungodly hour as he rolled onto his side. It took a beat for him to gain his bearings on the unfamiliar surroundings, but when he did, he was squinting into the darkness, narrowing in on the--

Shit, _no._ The _very empty_ bed across from him.

His heart sank in his chest. Immediately, his eyes shifted back to the nightstand, half expecting to find another note of abandonment left in Kevin’s wake. But it was past three in the fucking morning; surely he hadn’t ventured out on his own at this hour, and if he had, Connor didn’t even want to _think_ about the possible implications behind that or what he was doing or--

“Connor?”

His heart jolted a second time, and he jerked around to find Kevin curled up on the large window sill, the curtains pushed back enough for a muted spill of moonlight to enter the room. Balanced on his thighs was the hotel’s obligatory copy of the Book of Mormom, cracked open under the dim lamplight in the corner. Relief deflated in Connor’s chest like a balloon. 

“Kevin.”

He studied him for a moment, noting the way something subtle had changed from his earlier appearance. His eyes were no longer half-lidded and sluggish, less glassy as his pupils narrowed in on Connor from across the room. He seemed more… aware? As if some spell had worn off and he was back in his own body. Connor’s pajama pants were loose around his legs and long enough to envelope most of his socked feet. He looked almost comfortable. 

“Sorry, did the light wake you?” He closed the book in his lap, shifting in his position to sit up a little taller against the wall behind him. “I can turn it off.” 

He was already reaching for the switch when Connor raised a hand to stop him. “No, leave it on. Please.” Connor let out a yawn as he pushed himself to a sitting position as well, propping himself against the headboard. “What are you doing awake?” 

Kevin’s mouth popped open to reply, even as his eyes shifted slightly left of Connor, but closed almost immediately. He wrapped both arms around his shins and pulled his legs closer. 

“I, um. I didn’t want to wake you, again,” he confessed to the knees of his borrowed flannel pajama bottoms. “Like… like I did last time.”

Apology was written all over his face when he looked up again, and something in Connor’s chest positively crumbled. The memory of the boy’s heart wrenching cries was still crystal clear in his head, replaying as it had so many times over the course of the past few days. He wondered if there was any point in trying to assure Kevin it wasn’t his fault. 

“Do you have them often?” He asked instead, Kevin’s brow twitching downward in response. “The nightmares?”

“Oh.” Kevin blinked again. “Yeah, I— well.” He cleared his throat, looking pointedly away again. “I don’t really sleep all that much.”

In the darker corners of his mind, Connor heard a dozen iterations of what he was really saying: _I’m not allowed to sleep that much. I can’t sleep that much. I don’t feel safe enough to sleep that much. Yes, I have the nightmares all the fucking time._

Connor’s aching, desperate need to _know more_ about the person in front of him was countered by his fear of actually hearing the answers. Where did he sleep, when he wasn’t in a hotel with a stranger? With Connor? What kind of things was he dreaming about? And who? He didn’t ask any of them. Against his better judgement and the instinct in every bone of his body, he told himself he needed to respect Kevin’s boundaries. His open panic earlier at the mere prospect of Connor trying to help him had shaken both of them, and Connor had made something of a deal to convince him to stay. He wouldn’t push or pry. But that didn’t mean he had to leave him alone to suffer, either.

His legs swung over the edge of the bed, socks brushing the carpet. He nodded at the open spot on the window across from Kevin and met his eyes. 

“Mind if I join you?”

Kevin pulled his knees a little tighter to himself, even though there was already plenty of room for Connor, and nodded. 

It certainly wasn’t as nice a view as the hotel Eric’s dad had paid for on Connor’s birthday, but a tiny sliver of Lake Michigan was barely visible from between two buildings that obstructed the rest of it, a distant sparkle of reflected moonlight beyond the glittering lights of the city, so it at least had that going for it. 

“Did you grow up around here?” Connor asked without really thinking about it, his eyes focused on the water in the distance. A beat of silence passed, and then two before Connor looked over to Kevin, finding his expression a bit torn. After a moment, Kevin bit down on his lip, settling for a shake of his head. Connor waited for an elaboration, for him to offer some piece of information about himself, but it never came. 

“What about you?” He deflected, and Connor decided to let it go.

“Yeah, I did,” he answered plainly. “Well, mostly. I think everyone who grows up in the northern suburbs of Illinois likes to claim they’re a native Chicagoan. It sounds way cooler than saying you were born and raised in Naperville or wherever the fuck.”

He kind of expected the conversation to lapse into another silence at that point, which would have been fair considering Naperville, Illinois was hardly a jumping off place for a riveting discussion, so he was surprised when Kevin spoke again.

“Did you like it?” He asked, sounding genuinely curious. “Or, do you still, I guess?”

Connor sighed, resting his forehead against the glass. “I suppose it could have been worse,” he shrugged. “I was close enough to the city to feel like I was at least on the fringe of theater life. Taking the train in for weekend matinees or the occasional audition. Stuff like that.”

Kevin blinked. “You’re an actor?”

Connor laughed, an amused, bitter sound. “That would be a generous exaggeration of the word. I mean, I _have acted,_ yes, but I think I would have needed to actually book something in order to call myself an actor.”

“Are you in college? For acting?”

When Connor glanced over at Kevin, he was a little startled to see he still seemed genuinely invested. He knew it shouldn’t have, but it almost set him on edge, the feeling of someone being so interested in his life, or what he had to say about it. 

“Yes and no.” He tilted his head. “I’m in school, yeah. It’s just community college for now, until I can save up some money to go somewhere I really want to be. Majoring in musical theater is going to be a bit of a tough sell on my parents, though.”

“They don’t like the acting route?”

Connor shook his head. “I think they would see it as some sort of personal slight.” He laughed bitterly. “Me, picking the loudest, gayest way to exist in the world.”

He chose to ignore the way Kevin crined slightly at his response. There was a lull in the conversation, then, and Connor realized that would normally be the point where he asked Kevin what _he_ did. The question died on his tongue before he could even open his mouth, and for only the hundredth time, he found himself met with the desperate need to know _more._

“How old are you?” He asked before he could stop himself.

Kevin, who had been staring out at the same point in the distance, turned back to him. The moment of hesitation was quickly concealed, but there. “Nineteen,” he said before pausing again. His mouth opened, then closed, and Kevin dropped his eyes to the book on his lap. Connor followed suit, watching the younger boy’s thumb drag back and forth over the aged, leather binding. “In another life, I would have been starting my mission this year.”

Well, fuck. What was Connor supposed to say to _that?_ He kept his eyes on Kevin’s thumb, feeling the weight behind his words reverberate through his chest. 

“I didn’t go on my mission either,” Connor offered after a moment. “I came out to my family just before I was supposed to leave, and… well, I was going to be stationed in Uganda. That’s not exactly the safest place for people like us.” It took only a second before Connor realized what he had said. His face flushed red, quickly lifting his eyes back to Kevin. “Oh-- I’m sorry, I don’t mean to make assumptions, I just thought…”

“Yes,” Kevin cut him off, the barest hint of a smile pulling at his mouth. “People like us.”

“Okay.” He nodded. There was really no reason for a blush to be creeping up his neck again, so Connor chose to ignore it. “Um. Cool. So, anyway I probably dodged a bullet there.”

“Several bullets, perhaps,” Kevin said, the small smile pulling tighter at the corner.

Connor raised an eyebrow. Was Kevin… making a joke? The small glimmer in his eye was different from the ones he had seen before, accompanied by a tight smirk instead of a welling of tears, and Connor thought his heart might actually combust at the sight.

“God,” Connor laughed, running a hand through his unruly curls. “Well, that’s… dark. But maybe true.”

“Sorry,” Kevin shrugged, but he was still smiling, not looking all that sorry at all. 

Connor wanted to ask why he didn’t go on his mission, but he couldn’t find any way to phrase it without making it come out as _“how the hell did you get_ here?”

And maybe that was the real question he wanted to ask, anyway. 

“Can I ask you something?”

Kevin hesitated, apprehension written in his features, making Connor wince in apology. 

“You don’t have to answer it,” he followed up, softly. “And maybe it’s insensitive of me to ask. Sorry if it… I don’t mean to be.”

The only response was a curt nod from Kevin, a silent, anxious prompt to continue. 

Connor cleared his throat. There wasn’t really any right way to ask this, was there? No way to say the words and not sound, and feel, like a complete asshole. And maybe he was, just for thinking it. But he was desperate to understand him, this sweet boy sitting across from him, and while he was certainly made up of more than the sum of the circumstances that landed him here, understanding that part of his story was an essential first step.

“Why haven't you left?” He asked. “If what I said was true, if you don’t actually want to be… doing this…?”

He regretted the question almost as soon as he asked it, Kevin’s expression shifting to something even darker. Connor watched the curve of his throat bob with a particularly hard swallow as he turned his head to face out the window. In the dim light, he was almost sure he could see Kevin’s bottom lip tremble as he parted them, once and then again, searching for words that wouldn’t come. 

“It’s okay,” Connor whispered, his own voice suddenly thick with emotion. “Hey, it’s-- I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked that. You don’t have to explain anything to me.”

Without looking away from whatever spot in the distance he had settled on, Kevin gave a tight nod, closing his lips tightly together. Connor felt like shit on the bottom of a shoe. He was searching in the silence for some segue out of the tension he had blanketed them in when Kevin spoke up, so quiet Connor wasn’t even sure if he had meant for him to hear it at all.

“It’s better that it’s me,” he heard in a tight, pinched voice that sounded almost rehearsed. As if he had been trying to convince himself of that cryptic truth for some time. 

And, well. Connor had no fucking clue what that was supposed to mean, but he figured he had done more than enough prying for one night. Besides, something in the crack of his voice, the weight behind the words, the slight shimmer in his eyes, told Connor he would probably rather not know. He took the cue, and pretended he hadn’t heard. 

The silence they lapsed into was broken by a quiet, contagious yawn from Kevin, and Connor yawned right back, bringing a fist up to cover his mouth. 

“You should try to get some sleep,” Connor told him. “I promise, I don’t care if you end up waking me up. It’s not a big deal.” _And it’s not your fault,_ he wanted to add. 

Kevin shook his head. “I’m okay. Really,” he insisted. “You should sleep, though. You don’t have to stay up with me.”

For a moment, Connor thought about pushing a little harder, trying to convince him to get some rest when he was quite sure he didn’t get much outside the confines of this room, but it occurred to him that maybe the fear of waking Connor wasn’t the only thing keeping him up. And really, who was Connor to try and force him back into whatever hell awaited him behind closed eyelids?

When Kevin yawned again, Connor saw that he was staring at something just past his shoulder. When he turned around, he followed his gaze to the cheap hotel coffee maker on top of the dresser. He looked back at him, recognizing the open longing in his expression. 

Connor cleared his throat. “You know, I used to have really bad nightmares, too,” he said, drawing Kevin’s gaze back to him. “They’ve gotten a little better since I decided to take a step away from the church, but… Trust me, this isn’t my first midnight rodeo.”

Something in Kevin’s posture seemed to relax minutely at his words, and Connor’s heart swelled in encouragement, that maybe he was doing the right thing, finally.

“And I don’t know about you,” he started, nonchalantly swinging his leg over the side of the windowsill to stand, “but if we’re in this for the long haul, I’m going to need some liquid assistance.”

Kevin’s shoulders relaxed even further, and Connor practically melted as he pretended not to notice. He padded over to the coffee maker and began tearing open the plastic on the first coffee packet. 

“You want some?” He asked casually over his shoulder, pretending like he wasn’t doing this whole thing for Kevin’s benefit alone in the first place. Connor didn’t even like coffee unless it was masked with some kind of flavored creamer and a metric shit-ton of ice, but he could put his acting skills to good use for this purpose. 

When Kevin went a moment without responding, Connor turned back to him and found him staring at Connor as if he had offered him his kidney instead of a paper cup of bad hotel bean water. 

“Yes… um, please,” Kevin added quickly. “Thank you.”

“No problem.” Connor turned back to the coffee station and trying hard to push down the stab of pain at how fucking grateful this kid was for every bare minimum thing that was offered to him. 

He made the coffees in comfortable silence as Kevin continued to gaze out the window. One straight black for Kevin, and one with as many sugar packets to mask the bitterness as Connor could discreetly dump into a cup without judgement or diabetes. When he carried them back to the window, Kevin took his gratefully, cupping it between his palms with another sincere ‘thank you.’

Connor settled back into his place across from him, pulling his legs up to sit criss-cross on the ledge. He tilted his head at the sight in front of him, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

“I feel like you might be smited through the window for double fisting a cup of coffee and the _actual_ Book of Mormon,” he said.

Kevin snorted around his sip of coffee, looking down at the holy book in his lap as if he’d forgotten he was holding it. Two smiles in one night. Something in Connor lit up at the realization that he would do just about anything to provoke more of them. 

“I think the correct past tense of the word is actually _smote,”_ Kevin replied.

“Yeah, well, that sounds ridiculous, and it will hardly make a difference when we are fried to crisps on the windowsill, will it?”

Kevin chuckled again, but his eyes were fixed on the black liquid in his cup, something thoughtful stirring behind them as he rolled the cup between his palms. “If God hasn’t smited me yet, I doubt a cup of coffee is going to be the last straw.”

The louder part of his brain was screaming at him to counter his statement, to tell him that he was hardly the smite-worthy party in his situation, that it wasn’t his fault, that he had done nothing wrong. An even stronger part of him ached to reach out to him, to pull him into an embrace as he hadn’t stopped thinking about doing since the time he had held him in his arms and held him back to sleep. And if he would have thought Kevin wanted any of that, he would have done it in a heartbeat. 

Instead, he slid a socked foot out to playfully nudge against Kevin’s. “Smote,” he corrected.

Mercifully, Kevin looked back at him with another smile. Even if it was a little sadder than the last.

“Right. My mistake.”

* * *

The first thing Connor did when his eyes opened to a sliver of daybreak peeking through the curtains was check to make sure Kevin was still there. The air of relief rushed out of him when he found him, already awake and propped up against the headboard of his respective bed, his eyes unfocused somewhere in the direction of the window. 

“Good morning,” Connor croaked, pulling his arms up into a stretch. Kevin blinked, waking from whatever trance he was in to smile at him.

“Good morning.”

At the foot of the bed, the borrowed pajamas were neatly folded into a pile. Thankfully, this time, not beneath a cryptic goodbye note. Still, Connor’s heart sank a bit in his chest. 

“I have to leave soon,” Kevin said, sensing the direction Connor’s mind had already taken.

There was a heaviness behind the words that Connor couldn’t bring himself fully address. He had a shift at the diner that started in less than four hours and a checking account that was struggling to make it to payday, but suddenly some part of him was scrambling for some way to book a second night just so he wouldn’t have to walk away from him. 

Logically, though, he knew that wasn’t an option. For either of them. 

“I know,” he said somberly.

“I wanted to make sure you were awake before I left,” Kevin said after a moment. “I wanted to make sure I could say goodbye.”

Connor pushed himself up to a sitting position, swinging his legs to dangle off the side of the bed.

“I don’t want this to be the last time I see you.”

“Connor, I--” he broke off, swallowing thickly, his gaze averted. “I don’t… I mean, I can’t--”

“What if I pay for another night with you?” Connor interrupted, and Kevin looked up, eyes wide in surprise. “Not… not tonight, I mean. I… well, I’ll have to wait until I get paid again, but… next week? Same day?”

Kevin opened his mouth and closed it a few times, looking genuinely lost for how to respond. “You don’t have to do that,” he settled eventually, twisting his fingers nervously in his lap. “I’m… I know that’s a lot of money, and you’re not even getting anything out of it--”

“Hey,” Connor stopped him gently. “That’s not true. Just because I’m not…” he trailed off. “I like spending time with you, Kevin.”

“You do?”

“When you left last time, I really hated the thought of never seeing you again.” He paused, working over what he was trying to say. “I don’t know how long of an arrangement we can make this, but… but for now, I’d like to see you again. I wouldn’t offer if I didn’t think it was doable.”

Kevin shook his head, his eyes slipping away in that way that was starting to become familiar, whenever he was deep in thought about something. 

“You’re too nice to me,” he finally said. 

When was this kid going to stop shattering Connor’s heart?

“Hey,” Connor replied gently, waiting until Kevin looked up at him to continue. “You deserve to be on the receiving end of kindness. Okay?”

Kevin only shrugged in response. 

“I mean it,” Connor insisted.

“I know you do,” Kevin said. “I know you mean it when you say it, I just… It’s been a while since I have been.”

They sat in the heaviness of the moment for a few lasting seconds before Connor spoke up again. “So… another night, then?”

A nervousness buzzed in the air between them as Kevin took a moment to respond. And then…

“Yeah. Okay.”

Connor smiled. He pushed to his feet, a sliver of his midriff showing as he rose up in another stretch. 

“Great,” he said, trying to mask the open relief in his voice. “Can I make you another cup of coffee before you leave?”

The answer was written in the sad smile Kevin gave him as he stood, crossing his arms over his middle. “I actually need to get going.”

Connor ignored the painful thump in his chest. “Can I at least drive you anywhere?”

A small fraction of the anxiety he had witnessed the evening before flashed over Kevin’s features before he tore his eyes away again, bringing a hand up to scratch nervously at the back of his neck. 

“No, I--” he cleared his throat. “I have, um. Someone.”

Connor nodded slowly, resisting the urge to press for more information on who this _someone_ was, and if it was the same _someone_ who had given him the purple shiner under his eye socket. 

“Okay,” he said. 

He walked him to the door in some desperate attempt to hold onto him, to protect him from whatever and whoever awaited him on the other side of this room, for as long as he could. Before Kevin could reach for the handle, Connor stopped him. 

“Can I… would it be okay if I gave you a hug?”

Kevin turned back to him and blinked a few times, something swimming in his eyes before he nodded. 

Connor stepped in slowly, carefully gauging his reaction and wrapped his arms around the boy’s back. A long breath escaped through his nose as Kevin melted into the embrace, his own thin arms circling around Connor’s waist. Connor closed his eyes, feeling the brush of brown hair tickle his cheek, and all he could think was _thank god I found you again._ He didn’t know exactly what Kevin was going back to, but he had enough of an idea to make him squeeze tighter, hoping desperately to channel every ounce of strength and kindness he could into the embrace, as if he could somehow give him enough to survive on for the next six days before Connor could see him again.

“I’ll see you again Friday,” Connor whispered over his shoulder. 

“Friday,” Kevin repeated.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, a couple of things:
> 
> 1) This one is a little longer, so brace yourself for that. 
> 
> 2) Speaking of things to brace yourself for, this chapter is a heavy one. And like, I'm aware that most of the story has been as well, but I'm doubling down on the warnings here. This chapter bridges more of the gap in Kevin's backstory of how he got *here,* which... if you've read this far, you know was not a Great Path. So beware of the _italicized_ flash back shit and all that. 
> 
> 3) Thank you again, as always, for all the love people have shown for this story. Every bit of feedback makes my day.

_The first sensation he registered as darkness began to split at the edges was a bit of scratchy softness under his cheek. A mattress, maybe. No— a pillow? Behind closed eyelids, he could almost imagine waking up in Dom’s apartment, half-expecting the scent of black coffee or a lit joint that Kevin never took him up on to waft over to him at any moment. Maybe a kiss on the cheek, fingers through his hair, a soft_ ‘good morning’ _whispered against his skin._

_But none of it came._

_Pain. That was the next feeling he registered._

_First in his head, sharp and heavy and_ pulsing, _like the music at the club... the night before? The night of? Was it even morning yet? Had it all been a dream?_

 _He had no idea how much time had passed since he had been dancing with Dominic under the lights, sloshed and warm and happy and_ free _. It couldn’t have been long, though; the same sweaty, sticky feeling that melded their bodies together as they moved to the beat still clung to his skin, except it didn’t feel fun or hot or exhilarating anymore. Just dirty. And cold._

_Humming— there was humming, like an AC unit or a fan running somewhere not too far beyond the fog in his brain, sending chills over his body as the moisture met with cold air along his spine. He must have still been wearing the midriff cut-off that Dominic had loaned him. He had felt so confident in it earlier, after much flirtatious convincing and several shots down the hatch. Eventually, he had even gotten around to feeling kind of pretty in it, in a way he had never quite felt before. Now, he just felt exposed._

_The chill was enough to send full awareness rocking into him, his eyes cracking open. His lids felt heavy, much like the rest of his body, but it was the only part of him he could even_ think _about moving. It took considerable effort to hold them open, blinking slowly as his eyes rolled over the unfamiliar surroundings._

_Panic was a stream of ice water down his spine as it became clear: he was not in Dominic’s apartment._

_Somewhere just above him, a dim light painted a haze at the edge of his vision. Under his cheek, he could make out that the scratchy softness he had registered was not a pillow after all, but the cushion of a couch he had never seen before. It was upholstered with a brown, patchy imitation of velvet that felt like dull pinpricks against his cheek. Directly across from him, there was a bare mantle above a fireplace that looked like it hadn’t been used in years. In front of it, a poorly kept armchair that looked to be holding on by a thread. There was a man Kevin didn’t recognize sitting in it, tall and thin with black hair and pale skin, so out of focus it felt like Kevin was looking at him from under water. When the waves settled just enough for him to gain focus on the man’s face, all he could read in the cool, unfamiliar features was an apathetic disdain that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up._

_Something was very, very wrong._

_The lingering immobility fed the growing ball of panic faster than Kevin could suppress it. He stared at his own arm, which was strewn out in front of him, lifeless and dangling off the edge of the couch. It might as well have belonged to someone else; like how it felt when you slept in just the wrong position and woke up to a dead limb. Like it wasn’t quite attached to him anymore, like_ nothing _was quite attached, or maybe he was the one who had floated away and abandoned his body here. He tried to move it, any of it, to get any part of his body to respond to his frantic, instinctive thoughts of_ runrunrun get the hell out of here, _but he couldn’t so much as lift his head._

_A muffled sound from across the room pulled his focus toward a doorway. Voices, hushed and urgent, were shooting back and forth in an angry volley. He couldn’t hear what they were saying. Everything sounded so far away, trapped behind some invisible polycarbonate wall. Kevin blinked slowly, trying to make his eyes focus in the direction of the sound, to cling to some hint of familiarity that might tell him what was going on or where he was or who he was with._

_There were two of them arguing. Two guys. The one with his back to Kevin, facing the doorway, was tall and well-built, biceps that rivaled the circumference of Kevin’s thighs protruding from a sleeveless cutoff and sporting sporadic blurs of black ink that Kevin couldn’t quite make out._ Tattoos. _In the back of his mind, some tidbit from a crime show he had watched years ago at a friend’s house unearthed itself in his memory._ Try to remember any distinguishing marks or features. Something you can tell the police later to identify a perpetrator.

 __His _perpetrator._

_That line of thinking did nothing to quell the rapidly spiraling anxiety. His vision was starting to tunnel again, the fog around the edges closing in and threatening to drag him back into unconsciousness, when the smaller of the two men sidestepped just enough to make it into Kevin’s line of sight._

_Kevin’s heart leapt in his chest, this time out of relief._

_Dominic._

_Dom was here. Kevin wasn’t alone. He was safe. Everything was okay._

_“Dom,” he tried to say, to get his attention and let him know he was over there on the couch, but all that came out was a hum so quiet he wasn’t even sure if the sound had made it to the surface at all._

_But it must have, because his friend’s eyes shifted in his direction at the sound, his eyes locking with Kevin’s from across the room. It was only half a second, maybe less, and then he pulled his gaze quickly back to the man in front of him, almost as if trying to mask the fact that he had seen Kevin at all._

_“Dominic,” he tried again. This time, nothing came out. His heartbeat was a constant rattle inside his ribs. He was fading fast and terrified._

_He watched as the tall, faceless man shoved something into Dominic’s palm; a wad small enough to be concealed by their hands entirely, so Kevin couldn’t see what it was. Then Dominic reached for the knob behind him, twisting it to push the door open._

_To leave._

_He was leaving._

__Without him.

Wait! _Kevin screamed inside his head, desperate for the sound to get out. He was so sure if he could just get the words out so Dominic could hear him, then he would come back for him. It was all just a big misunderstanding. Everything would be okay._ Don’t leave me here. Please, don’t leave me. __

_Even though his words were trapped inside his throat, maybe his sheer and utter panic was coming off of him in waves, strong enough to get Dom’s attention anyway, because he cast one last glance at Kevin before he stepped outside._

_There was only a moment of hesitation. Just one. His eyes — the same eyes Kevin had looked into every morning for weeks, next to him in bed, across from him at breakfast, above him as he held himself over Kevin’s body and whispered sweet, soothing words to him as they moved together — were wide with apology._

_But Kevin didn’t want him to be_ sorry. _He wanted him to_ come back, _to get him out of here, to take him with him, away from this stranger’s eyes and the scratchy velvet couch and the terror. He wanted his friend to tell him everything was going to be okay._

_But his last thread of connection to Dom was broken as he lost the battle against his eyelids, slipping unwillfully back to darkness. Trapped in the blackness of his own unconsciousness, he heard the door slam shut. The last thing he felt in his final moments of semi-awareness was the cushion dipping beside him, and thick fingers in his hair that felt nothing like Dominic’s at all._

* * *

Sometimes it was more bearable, Kevin had learned with time, if he could make himself pretend he was with someone else when he was with the clients. Someone who loved him, and whose arms around his waist were only there to hold him closer, not hold him in place. Someone he loved back. If he just… closed his eyes and tilted his head back in just the right way, he could pretend he was with a boyfriend, a lover, maybe even a friend who he could laugh with in the morning and chalk the whole affair up to one too many drinks the night before.

Kevin had never had a real boyfriend before. He’d never had the chance. There had been crushes, of course. Longing, shameful gazes across the church pew at the bishop’s nephew. The feeling of his teammate’s hand on his thigh, his back pressed into the grass as they stretched each other before a track meet. He had managed to keep it all under lock and key, a constant heat simmering just below the surface, until he couldn’t any longer, and then he’d ended up here.

Maybe pretending would have been easier if he had someone whose face he could picture in place of the ever changing one he was trying to block out. The closest thing Kevin had ever had to a boyfriend was Dominic, and he refused to let his face be the one that filled his mind in the moments like this.

Dominic, who had betrayed him. Dominic, who had been the first and only person Kevin had ever been with because he wanted to. Dominic, who had _sold him._

The pain of the memory was still as sharp as the day he had planted the knife in his back. Kevin had trusted him. Dominic spent weeks earning that trust, getting to know him, digging his claws into the skin of a vulnerable boy out on his own, clutching onto what was underneath, getting to know all about him. He collected details about his family, his friends, his home; all to be handed over to a monster to weaponize against him. All under the guise of something Kevin thought could have maybe, eventually, been love. And he’d bought it — hook, line, and sinker.

There were a couple of times, early on, when Kevin had tried to picture James in the place of the strangers in his bed. He was beautiful, after all, and more importantly, he’d been the sole pinhole of light poking through to Kevin’s world for quite some time. But every time, the image was chased away by shame, and the knowledge that somewhere across the city, in some strange bed or car or back alley, James was suffering, too. And somehow it felt like a betrayal of its own.

So mostly, he defaulted to the faceless figures of his imagination, hoping they would be enough to carry him away from the moment when he needed it most. 

And then he met Connor. 

It was not intentional when it started happening. It was a few sporadic instances at first, when Kevin let his mind drift away from him. A hand would slide up his spine and he would close his eyes to the image of long, pale fingers and freckled arms. Tufts of hair would brush against the underside of Kevin’s chin, along his neck, and he would picture messy, copper curls in their place. 

He was quick to shake these images off, push them away as soon as they surfaced. Something felt inherently wrong about imagining Connor in that way, in _those_ moments. It felt like dragging him into hell beside him just so Kevin could have some company. He didn’t even really think about Connor in a particularly sexual way. The nights he spent with him were the only real reprieve he had from that sort of thing. It wasn’t as if he didn’t find him attractive. Anyone with a semi-functioning set of eyes could see that he was gorgeous, and Kevin had caught himself admiring his beauty on more than one occasion during their times together. But Connor represented so much more to him than that. Something closer to safety and kindness and, if he deluded himself so much to think so, _friendship._ Kevin didn’t think he would be able to associate any of those things with sex, ever again. 

He knew it was a dangerous game he was playing, letting himself get invested like this. He was toeing the line of the closest thing to trust he had been able to manage, aside from James, in over a year. And that was a terrifying prospect when he considered where that trust had gotten him last time. 

Much like the conjured images of him that arose in his weakest moments in bed, he tried to keep these feelings at bay for his own protection. But, much like the conjured images, he found that they often slipped past the confines of his own control, and sometimes he was simply too tired to keep fighting them off.

The man whose bed he occupied tonight was one of the nicer ones. 

He never really had any way of knowing for certain which clients were which, of the two main categories they generally came in. There were the guys who thought they were meeting up with a perfectly normal, perfectly willing young guy trying to make a little cash on a hookup app. He sometimes liked to imagine a backstory for the character he would be playing that night, like a projection of what his clients probably assumed about him. Maybe he was a struggling college kid, trying to pay his tuition without the help of his parents, or maybe he was just young and free and loved the way he could move his body and wanted to make some money from it. The way Kevin saw it, either of those false realities were preferable to the one he was stuck in, and he would take any chance to escape into that illusion, if only in his mind. 

Those nights were usually a lot quicker, a lot more informal, and sometimes physically painless. Those were the nights he found it a little easier to pretend.

And then there were the men who made special arrangements with the General and knew exactly what Kevin was, and exactly what they could do. Which was, within little limitation, whatever they wanted. There was no pretending, on those nights. There was only survival. 

After some time, he could usually tell them apart, even in the instances that the General didn’t tell him beforehand. But Kevin didn’t let that knowledge vary his behavior much. He just did what was expected of him every time. Far too many missteps and subsequent retaliations from the General were enough to keep him compliant. Terror had been a part of him for so long that it had turned to numbness under the pressure of trying to get through it. He didn’t think he had it in him anymore to try and compartmentalize the bad nights from the terrible ones, to treat them as anything separate from each other. There was too much risk associated in letting his guard slip like that. 

All he could do, tonight and on any of the relatively good nights, was be grateful that the man in the bed wasn’t a friend of the General’s, and that causing Kevin pain didn’t seem to be high on his agenda. 

“You alright, baby?” Kevin was brought back to the present by a gentle hand on his cheek, puffs of whiskey-stale breath against his lips. “Where’d you go?”

The stranger’s eyes were dark with lust, but his words at least seemed sincere, so Kevin forced a smile in hopes that the shadows in the room would hide what his performance lacked. He felt himself slipping into _Leo_ by pure instinct alone, because Leo knew how to smile just the right way, to lower his voice and arch his back and be whatever this man needed to get the night over with. Leo knew how to take what was given. He knew how to survive.

“I’m right here,” he said in a voice he barely recognized as his own. 

In the darkness of the room, he could almost pretend the brunette hair that hovered above him had a tint of red at the edges, kissed by the glow of the lamp in the far corner. He focused on that visual, alone, as he slid further into the sheets, his mind slipping into the hazy current of the drugs that pulled him out. _Three more days,_ a voice in his mind supplied as his eyes slipped shut. _Three more days, and then you get to see Connor again. Three more days until another good night._

Leo made all the right sounds, moved in all the places, drifted away just enough to get through the night. All the while, buried just below the surface, Kevin survived on the single cadence: _Three more days. Three more days. Three more days._

* * *

_Kevin shrank away from the stream of light that spilled in from the top of the staircase, nausea rearing up in him so quick and relentless he might have thrown up if there had been any contents left in his stomach. A low whine slipped out of him, muffled by the black fabric forced between his teeth._

_He knew what that light meant; the squeal of door hinges, sixteen steps down creaking wood._

_But it couldn’t be. Not again, not so soon. It couldn’t have been more than an hour since he’d left him there — the man he had seen arguing with Dominic in the doorway, the man who called himself the General — alone in the dark, on the mattress in the corner. Time was a blur, lost in the wash of terror and darkness and hunger and_ pain, _but he was almost certain he had_ just _left._

_He tucked his head into the corner as the figure at the top of the stairs made their way into the basement, his face buried in his arms to offer himself as much illusion of protection as he could with his hands zip-tied in front of him. He listened to each step with rising dread, counting each one to mentally calculate just how much time he had before he felt hands on him again. Through his panic, it barely registered that the footfalls sounded lighter this time, different from the heavy, thumping boots that hit each step with the promise of suffering. It almost sounded as if the person on the steps was wearing no shoes at all._

_There was a plea in Kevin’s throat, trapped behind his fear and the gag, and he knew it was no use wasting his energy on voicing it. By the time he counted to sixteen, he was struggling to breathe, frantic sobs heaving his chest. Every muscle in his body was strung tight and coiled in horrible anticipation, waiting to see what kind of touch he would be met with this time. But the voice that spoke didn’t belong to any of the men who had come down here before. It was softer, like the footfalls, and entirely unfamiliar._

_“Hey.” There was no scrape against the concrete floor, no indication that he was moving any closer to where Kevin lay, but the tension in his muscles did not recede. “I’m not going to hurt you. I promise. Can I…?” The person cleared their throat, pausing a moment before continuing. “Can I come closer?”_

_Immediately, Kevin let out an involuntary whine, drawing his arms and legs in closer, as if he could somehow make himself small enough to disappear altogether._

_“Just so I can take that thing out of your mouth!” he quickly followed up. “I just wanna… I brought you some water. I thought you might be thirsty.”_

_Kevin froze, the tension in his shoulders slackening slightly. The telltale ache of dehydration was settling deep into his muscles, making all his movements slow and lethargic, his head pounding. The General had given him water at some point, but that was… hours? Days ago? He wasn’t sure. He only knew that it was only just enough to keep him alive, and maybe not even that for much longer. He needed water. It wasn’t a negotiation, and he was hardly in a position to be turning it down, no matter what kind of stranger was making the offer._

_Slowly, Kevin untucked himself from the ball he had shrunken into, keeping his knees up to preserve as much modesty as he had left. The movement, no matter how small, sent a jolt of pain through his body. He hurt so badly, everywhere. Kevin squinted against the light that spilled in around the stranger, and when he stepped a little closer, eclipsing more of the light from behind him, Kevin could make out that he was close to his own age. The realization was somehow both startling and comforting in the same breath._

__“Mmmmhh?” _His attempt at a question, a plea, came out as nothing more than a pathetic hum behind the gag. He raised his bound hands to the fabric, trying and failing to pull it down to his chin, but the knot at the back of his head was tightly secured, holding it in place with bruising force between his lips._

_The boy standing at the bottom of the stairs winced. “Can I?” He asked, gesturing toward his mouth. He waited for Kevin to respond, making no move to invade his space. Hesitantly, Kevin nodded. “Thank you,” the boy breathed, slowly coming around to the side of the mattress and lowering himself to his knees._

_Kevin shuffled forward a few inches, still wary of the stranger’s motives, and bent his neck to give access to the knot at the back of his head. Long, thin fingers made quick work at the base of his skull, tugging gently at the fabric until Kevin felt the tension release_

_He flexed his jaw automatically, feeling little bits of muscle and cartilage crackle under his skin after days of being locked in place. It was both terrible and wonderful, the sensation of the fabric pulling free from his teeth; his dry, scratchy tongue. He’d been wearing it for days on end, for however long it had been since he had woken up in the pitch black basement, only getting a reprieve from it for the brief sips of water or—_

_He couldn’t let himself think about that right now. He looked up at him again._

_“Th-thank you.” His voice was barely recognizable as his own, and he winced at the stab of pain in his throat as he attempted to speak, the result of days worth of screaming and severe dehydration._

_“Here.” The boy raised a red, plastic cup into his line of sight. “Drink.”_

_Carefully testing the muscles in his hands, Kevin uncurled his fingers as far as he could within his restraints. Days of having his blood flow restricted from the too-tight strips of plastic had rendered his hands half-numb, and in the dim light from upstairs, he could see now that they had turned a sickening shade of grayish-purple. With a lurch or horror, he wondered how much longer he could go before permanent damage set it, or if it already had._

__Or if he would be killed before he got to that point. __

_“Do you need help?” The boy offered, already lifting the cup toward Kevin’s mouth, but Kevin flinched back, working hard to unfurl his fists the rest of the way._

_“No, I… I think I can, can d- do it.” Every word felt like a razor blade to his throat, and the desperate need for water was only stronger now that it was right in front of him. It was enough motivation to manage a weak grasp around the cup with both hands._

_His arms trembled as he tipped the cup into his mouth, but the wash of cool water that slid past his tongue and down his aching throat was nothing short of heaven in the midst of all the hell encapsulating him. The boy stood by with one hand ready to steady him as Kevin drank, only taking short breaks from the cup to pull in sharp, ragged breaths before diving back in._

_When he was done, Kevin lowered the empty cup, pressing it wordlessly back into the boy’s hands. He took a few moments to try and steady his breathing, clearing his throat to find the pain has lessened slightly. He lifted his eyes back to the stranger’s._

_“Who are you?” He whispered coarsely._

_“My name is James,” he answered immediately, shuffling back on his knees to give Kevin some more space, earning several more points in his book. “What’s yours?”_

_The apprehension was still there, but Kevin couldn’t really find much more to lose, nor the energy to keep his guard up._

_“Kevin,” he croaked._

_“Have you eaten anything since you’ve been here?”_

_Kevin shook his head, closing his eyes against the gnawing ache in his belly he had been trying so hard to ignore._

_“Okay,” James whispered. “Hold on.”_

_Without another word, he stood from Kevin’s side and headed for the stairs leading back up to the main house. A lightning bolt of panic struck through Kevin’s core for some reason he couldn’t quite place._

_“Wait!” He called after him as he scrambled to sit up, the chain bolting his ankle to the floor rattling with the movement. “Where are you— please don’t leave me.”_

_James’s face twisted in pain, even as he offered up a small smile. “I’ll be right back,” he promised._

_Kevin watched helplessly as he retreated up the steps, mercifully leaving the door open so Kevin wouldn’t be cloaked in darkness again. He strained to listen to what was going on in the room above him. The kitchen, Kevin had deduced by listening to the muffled sounds over the past few days._

_Less than a minute had passed before James reappeared at the top of the steps, and Kevin deflated with a breath of relief he hadn’t realized he was holding. As he moved closer, Kevin saw that he was carrying a loaf of plain white bread, along with a refilled cup of water._

_“I’m sorry I can’t give you more,” he apologized sincerely as he knelt beside Kevin again. “He’ll notice if there’s too much missing, and I don’t want to give you anything that will stay on your breath. It’s better if he doesn’t know.”_

_Kevin truly couldn’t care less. At that moment, a slice of bread would feel like a Thanksgiving feast on his empty stomach. James handed him a slice and Kevin took it gratefully, wasting no time shoving half of it into his mouth, chewing with ravenous hunger. He practically melted as the bland, spongy sustenance gave under his teeth. He was done almost as soon as he’d started, and James handed him another, setting the bag on the mattress and nudging it toward him, a silent invitation to take more if he needed._

_He had already demolished the second piece before his manners came back to him, blinking up at James._

_“Thank you,” he spoke around his last swallow._

_“Don’t worry about it,” James whispered in response._

_Kevin brought the cup to his lips again, drinking with a little more composure than he had before but still managing to down half the water. When he was finished, he looked up at James, fighting back the little trill of fear at asking his next question._

_“Are you— do you work for… him?” He couldn’t bring himself to say the name, or the stupid fucking nickname, whatever he called himself._

_James really didn’t seem like he did, but everyone else who had come downstairs so far had been one of his_ associates. _That’s what they called themselves, anyway. Maybe that was what Dominic had been._

 _An_ associate. __

_But James had been far kinder than any of the rest. He hadn’t shown any indication of wanting to hurt him, or even touch him other than to help him, which already set him far apart from everyone else._

_“I… not in the way you think.”_

_Kevin shook his head, an instinctive panic rising at the careful avoidance in the boy’s response. “What does that mean?”_

_“Look, I…” James turned his head away briefly, pinching his eyes shut. “What has he told you? About why you’re here?”_

_“Why I’m…? He hasn’t told me_ anything!” _Kevin’s voice high and pinched and nearing hysteria. “I was out with… with my friend, and then I woke up in a house and there was…_ he _was there, and there was, was some sort of drug and I— I woke up here. I don’t… I don’t know how long I’ve been here, but he keeps…” He broke off into a sob. “He keeps hurting me and hurting me and I—” He didn’t realize until it was too late that his breaths had run sharp and ragged, coming too quick and too short to keep up with._

_“Shhh, hey. Hey.” James whispered from beside him, placing a soft hand on Kevin’s arm. “Breathe. You need to take a deep breath, okay?”_

_Kevin tried, but his lungs felt like they were being crushed under the weight of everything his mind and body had been forced to endure, finally breaking under the pressure of it all._

_He wanted to go home. He just wanted to go home. Every bone in his body, every nerve and fiber of his being ached to be with his family again, somewhere far, far away from here. The last time he had seen his mother, they hadn’t parted on the best of terms. Things had been bad, bad enough for Kevin to turn away from his home, his family, and at the time he thought he was doing what was best for himself. But now, he would give anything, anything in the world, to have his mother hold him and tell him everything was going to be okay. He would do anything to take it all back._

_“Please,” Kevin rasped through tears, clutching onto James’s sleeve with his bound hands. “Please, you have to help me, you have to— you have to get me out of here, please.”_

_“I can’t,” James replied brokenly, barely a whisper as he squeezed over Kevin’s hand with his own. “I’m… I’m so sorry, I can’t do that.”_

__“Please,” _he cried again, but he had already begun to crumble under the resolution in James’s voice. He collapsed into tears against the mattress. He wasn’t getting out of here. He would keep getting... hurt, over and over, and then he would die here. He knew it._

_“Listen,” James spoke urgently after a moment. “Listen to me. You have to do what he says, alright? It will be easier for you if you stop fighting.”_

_“But—”_

_“I know. I understand, okay? I’ve been down here before, right where you are.”_

_Kevin blinked up at him, trying to make sense of what he was saying, of any of it._

_“But you have to understand what I’m saying,” he urged on. “He’s keeping you down here to break you. I’ve seen boys stay down here for weeks at a time, and I’ve seen some who never come back up at all. The best thing, the only thing, you can do right now is just survive. And the best way to do that is to let him think he’s broken you.”_

_A dark and malicious part of Kevin’s mind wanted to counter that it wouldn’t be a matter of letting him just think it for much longer. He might just be actually broken. But he didn’t say that._

_“Once he thinks you’re broken, you’ll get to come upstairs,” James said, as if that explained anything at all._

_“What happens upstairs?” Kevin shook his head again. “I don’t… I don’t understand what’s going on.”_

_“Upstairs is…” James trailed off, seeming to lose himself momentarily in his own thoughts before shaking his head and meeting Kevin’s gaze directly. “Well. At least you won’t be down here.”_

* * *

“Hi.” Connor was smiling when he opened the hotel door, a swoop of red curls falling over one side of his forehead. A breath Kevin didn’t realize he was holding slipped out of him at the sight of him. 

“Hello.” He didn’t miss the way Connor’s eyes dropped instantly to the fading bruise on his cheekbone, nor the way he immediately forced them back up, his expression growing slightly tighter. “Happy Friday,” he said. 

Kevin smiled. “Happy Friday.”

When Connor led him into the room, there was already a spread of their usual appetizers lined up along the dresser, complete with two freshly-steaming cups of coffee at the corner. The smell drifted over to him and he felt his empty belly roll with hunger. 

Across from the display, a set of pajamas, the same checkered pattern he had seen the week before, was folded into a neat pile on the corner of the bed. On top were two paperback books, both worn and tattered at the edges, like they’d been read again and again over a long stretch of time. He looked from the pile back to Connor, and he must have read the question in his eyes because he followed his gaze and shuffled over to pick up the book. 

“Oh. So, um... You don’t have to read these or anything if you don’t want to, but I brought a couple favorites from my collection. I thought you might get bored of just watching TV, so…” He paused, the corner of his mouth ticking up just slightly. “Plus, you know, I thought I would offer up some less smite-worthy reading material, in case you go for the midnight coffee again.”

Kevin picked up the thicker of the two novels, turning it over in his hands. He grazed over the synopsis on the back, thumbing over the smooth, glossy paperback, then set it back down. “Thank you,” he said, sincerely. 

“No problem.” 

There was a weighted pulse of silence before Connor cleared his throat. He turned, heaving a large backpack onto his designated bed and unzipping it to rifle through the contents. 

“I also just wanted you to have something to do because I’m going to be pretty bogged down tonight.” Kevin watched as he unloaded several textbooks, a notebook, and folders out onto the bed, spreading them out. “College stuff,” he explained, glancing up at him. “I have exams coming up, but I’ve been picking up so many extra shifts at the diner that I haven't done any of the prep for it, so… here we are.” 

There was a sharp prickle in Kevin’s chest at Connor’s words. Overnight calls weren’t cheap, and neither were motel rooms — even the sleazier ones they found themselves in after the first night. He didn’t know much about Connor’s financial situation, or much about his life in general that existed beyond these walls, but it seemed like a fair assumption that the ‘extra shifts’ were probably to pay the cost of his weekly visits with Kevin. 

If Connor noticed his drop in mood, he didn’t say anything. Instead, he tossed his backpack down to the floor and grabbed two of the paper plates that came with the food delivery, handing one off to Kevin. 

“Dig in,” he invited. “Or shower first. Whatever you want to do. If you need me, I’ll be drowning in my little pile of misery over here.”

Kevin looked to the spread of food, and then back to the pile of fresh pajamas, opting to hesitantly pick them up and hold them to his chest. 

“I think I’m going to shower first,” he said softly as Connor began filling his own plate.

“Sure. Take your time.”

Maybe the heat of the shower would help wash away the sudden, sticky guilt.

* * *

They had been working separately in comfortable silence for at least an hour. Kevin was already a third of the way into the first book Connor had lent him, and on his second cup of coffee, which sat cooling on the nightstand beside him. The scraps of leftover food had long been boxed up and shoved into the mini fridge, only once Connor had received ample assurance from Kevin that he had eaten his fill. 

Kevin was reaching for a sip of his coffee when a low groan of frustration pulled his attention to the opposite bed. He looked up in time to see Connor flop dramatically onto his back, his arms thrown over his face. The spread of paperwork around him seemed to have doubled in both size and disarrangement since Kevin had last looked over at him. 

He closed the book. “What’s wrong?”

From behind his arms, Connor snorted. “In short, my brian,” he said dryly. “Alternatively, there’s the longer answer of overarching issues within systems of higher education and how they impose an unnecessary course load on students who show no interest or promise in a related field. But we can get into that another time.”

After a moment with no response, he peeked out from under his arm to see Kevin looking at him with an eyebrow raised. Connor sighed. 

“Okay, it’s mostly just my brain,” he said, pushing himself upright. “Whatever hardwiring is going on up there, it wasn’t intended for doing math.”

In the fleeting moment before he could remember to squash it, Kevin felt an ugly stab of jealousy deep in his chest. 

His post-graduation plan had been laid out for him most of his life, to the point where he never really had to take time to consider his options. It was mission, then BYU, and probably a wedding somewhere along the way. It was what his father had done, and his father’s father, and for that matter, nearly every other boy in their church. It wasn’t until late high school when Kevin started to really question things — not only about the plans set before him, but about everything he’d ever been taught about his faith. He had learned, quite quickly, that _questioning_ within the church was not taken kindly to, and that had only succeeded in pushing Kevin further away. 

By the time he reached the end of his Senior year, Kevin was struggling to conceal his silent resentment and the fear that attending such a strict Mormon University would feel a lot less like the escape that had been hoping for. It felt like he would be slipping out from his parents’s thumb only to wedge himself under an even larger, more oppressive one. And with everything else Kevin had recently begun to question, about his church and himself, that prospect was crushing. It was far from the only reason he had ended up running away from home, but perhaps it had been a bit of a jumping off point. 

Now, nineteen and reflecting on the way his life had turned out, Kevin would have given anything to be sleeping in a shitty, lofted dorm bed at Brigham Young University, across from some straight-edge dogooder who woke up early to iron his jeans before class or something equally aggressively mormon. He would have given anything to be knee-deep in homework, his largest immediate concern being an impending exam or a heavy course load. That was the way it was supposed to be. Those were the kind of stressors kids his age were supposed to have.

But of the two people in the room, Connor was hardly the one at fault for Kevin’s downward spiral, so he swallowed back the pinch in his throat and nodded toward the nearest pile of paperwork. 

“What kind of math is it?” he asked.

“Calculus,” Connor spoke the word like it was something vile. “Personally, I wanted to take Basic Math in Daily Life because no musical theatre program worth my time was going to require anything beyond that. Obviously, my parents had other opinions.”

“What are you working on right now?”

Connor bubbled out a humorless laugh. “Please, I don’t want to bore you with this garbage. I was just complaining into the void. Please, don’t let me keep you from your book.”

 _“Your_ book,” Kevin corrected, swinging his legs off the side of the bed. “Try me.”

Connor raised an eyebrow, looking at him in a way that Kevin couldn’t quite decipher, before finally sighing with a shrug. “Suit yourself, but I hold no personal liability if you die of boredom.”

“I’ll alert my legal team.”

Connor plucked the worksheet closest to his bent knee from the pile, handing it across the gap between the beds. Kevin leaned over and took it, bringing it closer to inspect. It was almost shameful, the tiny spark of something like comfort he felt looking at it. He let his eyes scan over the loopy scrawl of Connor’s pencil marks, mentally trying to work through his problem solving for each equation. He couldn’t help but smile at the sheer amount of smudged eraser marks and scribbled out numbers that littered the page, as well as the distracted doodles of flowers he had done off in the margins when the math itself had evidently been too much to focus on.

After a moment of deliberation, he looked up at Connor, whose hair, he was only now noticing, was tousled and unruly from the stress, copper curls poking out in every which direction. “You kind of suck at this,” he said. 

Connor’s mouth popped open, jaw slack in both feigned offense and perhaps genuine shock that Kevin had said it. “Look, I was very transparent about my mathematical shortcomings, okay, you don’t have to rub it in.”

“Sorry.” Kevin smiled wryly. “I’m mostly kidding.”

“You’re not, though.” He pinched his eyes shut, rubbing the heels of his palms over them. “Honestly, maybe I should just bomb the exams. At the very least, it will serve as an ‘I told you so’ _to my parents, and maybe I’ll be able to take my Math for Dummies class next semester as God intended.”_

“You’re not dumb,” Kevin shook his head. “You actually were close on a couple of these, you just missed a step and it threw off the rest of your work. Here.” He stood and crossed the short gap between the beds, leaning over so that his face was parallel to Connor’s, the worksheet held out in front of them. “See, you just forgot to find the value of C.”

When Connor only responded by blinking up at him cluelessly, Kevin pointed back at the paper. 

“The constant. Whenever you’re working with an indefinite integral, you have to remember to add the constant.” He smiled, just slightly, at the blank expression on Connor’s face. “Do you— can I borrow your pencil?”

“Please,” Connor insisted, clicking his mechanical pencil up a couple notches before handing it over. 

Without thinking about it, Kevin sank down next to him on the bed, propping his leg up to supply a writing surface. If he hadn’t been singularly focused on the page in front of him, he might have noticed the subtle shift in Connor’s posture or the trickle of warm pink that made its way up his neck at the new proximity. 

He scribbled his additions alongside Connor’s work as he talked him through the equation, small, jagged streaks of graphite stark against the redhead’s smooth, curvy penmanship. It was kind of amazing, even to him, that he was able to slip into the process like an old sweater after all this time, the feel of a rapidly scratching pencil as right as rain between his fingers. Numbers had always made sense to him in a way that was almost comforting, and he couldn’t deny the tiny thrill of joy at the realization that that part of him hadn’t withered completely with time when so many others had.

When he finished, after plugging in the answer to check his work, he breathed a long exhale and circled the new number, flashing it toward Connor with a smile. “See how I got that?”

Connor blinked. “Absolutely not. That was witchcraft,” he said. And then, “Do it again.”

Kevin’s mouth quirked up at the corner, and he got to work on the next problem, taking extra care to explain each step this time as he went. 

Somehow, inexplicably, the distance between them shrank little by little over the course of an hour, each shift so subtle that it remained undetectable. By the end, they were side by side against the headboard, the knees of their pajama pants brushing just slightly as they balanced the notebook between them. 

At some point, Connor had retrieved the leftovers from the mini fridge, rewarding himself with a cold french fry every time he got a question right on his own. That became a game within itself, as Connor, desperate for any short distraction from the math, challenged Kevin to try and toss them into his mouth. They usually missed, and one time he’d thrown it a bit too aggressively, resulting in a retching gag as the fry harpooned the back of Connor’s throat, but that only made them laugh harder, and it was… 

It was the most like his age Kevin had felt in a long time. 

Connor slapped the notebook shut as soon as they finished revising the last problem, chucking it like a frisbee to where it landed at the end of the bed with a satisfying _thwap._ He let his lead fall back against the padded headboard, his eyes falling shut. 

“Whoever created calculus was a sadist,” he declared.

“Sir Isaac Newton?” Kevin raised an eyebrow in his direction, definitely _not_ taking advantage of the moment to let his eyes trace over the sharp edges of Connor’s profile, the pale, freckled skin stretched over narrow bone and wiry muscle. 

One eye popped open as he tilted his head back down just enough to give Kevin an incredulous scowl. “How do you know that?”

“Is that not common knowledge?”

Connor’s eyes slipped shut again, a dramatic sigh slipping through his parted lips. “You know what, maybe I’ll just drop out of college, actually.”

“Let’s not make any rash calls to the bursar’s office just yet,” Kevin said. “I’m more than happy to help you again next week.” 

Connor looked over at him and Kevin’s mouth popped open, a flush rising to his cheeks. 

“Wait. Sorry, I didn’t mean to assume…”

“Next week sounds great.” Connor cut him off. “If you want to. But I promise, I won’t subject you to this torture every time.”

Kevin exhaled, trying to mask his show of relief at the promise of having another night like this, another light on the horizon to get him through another week.

“It’s not torture. And it only seems fair that you finally get something out of this arrangement,” Kevin countered, continuing before Connor had a chance to object. “Besides, I really don’t mind. I… kind of miss doing things like this.” 

He regretted it almost immediately, because, god, what a pathetic thing to say, and the pity to show for it was written all over on Connor’s face. As if on cue, the words that had been itching at the back of his mind all week surfaced once again, the twinge of concern in Connor’s voice sharp in his memory.

_Why haven’t you left?_

Hidden in that question was a thousand others, all of which Kevin had asked and answered to himself a hundred times over in the past year, and none of which he felt he could properly explain to Connor.

Kevin knew why he couldn’t leave. He knew exactly why, and reminded himself daily, and yet it made it no easier to stay. He could try telling Connor the truth, he supposed, but there was always the fear of the information pushing Connor further in the direction of trying to get the police involved on his behalf, and Kevin couldn’t risk that. Beyond that obvious risk, there was the impenetrable wall he kept raised between them, a wall built by a charming, pierced-lipped boy and reinforced by every stranger he’d bedded after that, and no amount of kind words and sincerity from Connor seemed to make a dent in it.

_Why haven’t you left?_

Would it make it any better if he could tell him? Would it make any difference at all?

* * *

_The plastic ties that had cut into his skin for days had long been abandoned, leaving his hands free and his wrists raw and ridgid with indentations and dried blood, but the absence of the restraints was almost more of a blow than it was a relief. He had been left there, after the last round, with his arms limp at his sides, dead weight against the mattress, because they both knew he was long past the point of physical resistance._

_He had lost so many pieces of himself already; to the endless darkness of the basement, to the pills he made him swallow and swallow and swallow until his head felt like it was stuffed full of cotton and all of his thoughts were trapped in the middle of the tangle where he couldn’t reach them. To the hunger, the dehydration, the fear, the hopelessness, the pain. He wasn’t sure how much of him was left to lose._

__“Let him think he’s broken you.” __

_The advice James had imparted on him all those days ago — weeks ago? hours? — bounced around the inside of his skull, muffled through the fog._

_Kevin parted his lips, his tongue like sandpaper as he pulled it away from the roof of his mouth. “I’m broken,” he whispered, so hoarse that it came out as mostly a whine around the vowels. His eyes fluttered shut at the sound, and if he had any proper hydration left in his body, he would have expected to feel tears glittering in his lashes. “I’m bro- broken.”_

_He wanted him to hear. He wanted his confession to carry up through the floorboards of the old house, into the living room he had only seen once in a drug-induced haze, or to the kitchen above he had only heard being used to cook food that was never, ever for him. He wanted him to know that had won, that he had gotten what he wanted from him. That he could end it now. Please._

_When he finally did hear the door at the top of the steps open, the dreaded stream of light crawling over his body like lava overtaking him, it could have been seconds later or hours. He had let his eyes slip shut for only a moment, and when he opened them, the General was standing over him, staring down with a look of amused satisfaction, and Kevin wondered, absurdly, if he had heard his whispers after all._

_“Rise and shine, princess.” He accented his greeting with a nudge of his boot against Kevin’s bruised ribs, and his body twitched more on instinct than anything, a pathetic attempt and failure to curl in on himself. “You and I need to have a conversation.”_

_The General watched him expectantly. If Kevin looked straight at him, he knew he would have seen a glimmer of amusement in his eyes at his open misery, so he kept his gaze low as he pushed his arms under him to leverage himself into a sitting position. As soon as he was upright, Kevin pressed his back to the wall, cornering himself as far away from the man as he could possibly get. The General smirked as he dropped into a crouch next to the mattress._

_“You’ve been down here a long time,” he spoke with a faux sympathy that made Kevin’s stomach turn. “I bet you’re ready to come upstairs, aren’t you?”_

__Let him think he’s broken you. __

_Kevin kept his eyes on the mattress as he nodded, pinching them shut when the General chuckled in response._

_“I thought so.”_

_Kevin knew what going upstairs meant now. He knew what it meant for him. He’d pieced it together from everything James told him, from the snide comments the men would make in his direction when they came downstairs, about how a pretty thing like him would make the General lots of money when he was ready._

_He guessed the General had decided he was ready now._

_“I need a little insurance policy before we do all that, though.” Kevin’s eyes finally lifted to his at the menace behind his words. The General smiled at him. “I brought something to show you.”_

_The General pulled a phone out of his pocket and stood. Kevin flinched away from the movement on instinct, then watched warily as he scrolled through something out of Kevin’s line of sight._

_“Our old friend Dominic was very helpful. Said you were quite the open book after just a little bit of prying. Opened yourself right up.” He glanced up at Kevin long enough to wink, and Kevin recoiled. “Made my job a lot easier, that’s for sure. He told me all about you. Enough that I was able to send a friend of mine on a little visit to Carmel, Indiana last weekend.”_

_Kevin’s blood went cold at the mention of his hometown. Before he could ask for an explanation he wasn’t quite sure he wanted to hear, the General flipped his phone around, dropping back into a crouch so Kevin could see. Everything in his body froze._

_The photo was blurry, probably taken from a distance and cropped in closer, but it was just clear enough for Kevin to make out the unmistakable backdrop of Carmel High School. There were kids in light jackets and backpacks making their way to busses and into cars, and at the very front of the frame, in sharp focus as he climbed into the passenger seat of their mom’s Volvo, was Jack Price._

_“No,” Kevin whispered._

_“He looks a lot like you, your little brother,” the General remarked, his lips curling into a smile at Kevin’s distress. “Pretty. A little younger. Sixteen, right? Such a fun age.”_

_“Please.” Kevin’s eyes welled with tears as he moved forward onto his knees, begging. “Please, don’t hurt him.”_

_The General ignored him, swiping his finger across the screen to switch photos to another familiar backdrop. He recognized the building as the dance studio downtown where Kayla took her ballet lessons. Sure enough, there she was. At the bottom of the frame, a jacket thrown over her dance uniform as she hugged her friend on the sidewalk. Kevin choked out a sob._

_“Kayla Price. Thirteen. Dance class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, violin on Wednesdays.” There was a sharp glean in his eyes that cut right through Kevin’s chest. “The studio is only a fifteen minute walk from your home, so she’s allowed to walk alone now, speaking of things that make my job easier.”_

_“Stop,” Kevin practically growled through his tears. The idea of them, either of his siblings, experiencing even a fraction of the suffering Kevin had been subjected to was more than he could bear to think about. His stomach turned at the very thought. “You’re fucking disgusting. She’s just a_ kid. _They both are! You can’t- you can’t do this.”_

_“Oh, I can.” The General clicked the phone screen to black and dropped forward onto one knee. Kevin pressed himself further into the wall. “And I will, without hesitation, if you decide to cause more trouble than you’re worth. Everyone's replaceable, and you just so happen to come with two easy options.”_

_Hopelessness was sinking over Kevin like a weighted net, trapping him from all angles and he had no way to fight it off. If the choice was between Kevin or them, there was no choice at all. Not if he was the one who had to make it._

_“They would do quite well for me here. Maybe even better than you,” the General said. “You’d be wise not to let me think on it for too long, or else I might make the decision for you. And it might not be one you like.”_

__I don’t like any of this, _Kevin screamed inside his head, more tears breaking free to slide down his bruised and swollen cheeks._

_The General stared him down, considering his captive with a tilted head. After a moment of a silent standoff, he cracked a smirk and stood once more, taking a step toward the staircase. “In fact, I might make a call right now.”_

_He had one foot on the bottom step when Kevin lurched to his feet, nearly collapsing as soon as his weight shifted to his weakened legs._

_“Wait!” He cried. The General stopped, turning back to him slowly. Kevin’s knees did buckle then, folding underneath him until he was kneeling on hard concrete. “Please, wait.”_

_This earned a smile from the other man as he made his way back toward him. “Do you have something you’d like to say to me?” he asked, hooking a finger under Kevin’s chin so that he was forced to look into his eyes. Tears spilled down like rain and Kevin distantly wondered how he possibly had the hydration in his body to keep crying after all this time._

_The General’s touch on him was like fire and ice at once, heavy with threat and memories of the past week that made his gut churn. Kevin wanted more than anything to push it away from him, but he swallowed back his resistance, his dignity, all of it, to force himself to hold his gaze. To speak._

_“Keep me,” he whispered, his voice tight and cracked under the weight of his words. “Please. Don’t hurt them, just… just leave them alone and keep me instead. Please.”_

_The smile that spread across the taller man’s face told Kevin he had said exactly the right thing, and it felt like fastening the lock on his own cage. Despair hollowed out his chest like a crater, emptying out every part of him necessary to make room for survival._

_“You’ll be good for me, won’t you?” The General tightened his grip around Kevin’s jaw._

_Kevin felt himself starting to slip away in the faint, foggy way he was becoming accustomed to. When things got to be too much, when the pain or the hopelessness started to crush him, some other part of his mind stepped in to take him somewhere else, somewhere far away from this man and this basement and the sad, broken person Kevin was becoming._

_He had no power here, he had nothing left, but he could make this one choice to save the two people he loved most in this world._

_“I’ll do whatever you want.” He let out a sob. “Please, just don’t hurt them.”_

_Kevin let his head fall forward as the General released him. He retrieved a tiny, orange bottle from his pocket — one that Kevin had seen every day, multiple times a day since he’d been down there — and popped the cap, shaking two little, white pills into his palm._

_“Show me,” he ordered, holding them out for him to take._

__Better me than them, _Kevin told himself as he stared down at the pills, his chest tightening with the anticipation of spiraling back into haze. He thought of his siblings’s faces as he plucked them from his hand, popping them into his mouth without hesitation._ It’s better that it’s me. _Maybe the effects of the drugs would even be welcome this time. Maybe it would help alleviate the feeling of hopelessness, even just for a little while, now that he had surrendered himself to it fully._

_He swallowed them back dry, cringing once at the ache in his throat and again at the feeling of fingers tangling into his hair. Kevin closed his eyes against the feeling, willing the drugs to take him over sooner rather than later. If this was what his life was to be now, he would rather not be sober for a single minute more of it._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, look, I told you it was dark, okay? 
> 
> Anyway, I might have mentioned before that I've been focusing heavily on this story for NaNoWriMo and it's been... a surprisingly successful endeavor. I've managed to backlog 3+ chapters for this story, which means you won't have to wait so long for the next update, unless something goes terribly awry. 
> 
> Any love you choose to show me will make my day. Also, just saying, it's my birthday and nice comments are a very Good and Free gift idea... :)


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HI, so after the absolute sob story that was the last chapter, I think we deserve some lightness. This chapter definitely has more of that, though let's be real, there's plenty of angst sprinkled in as well because this is me we are talking about here. You'll also notice this chapter has a bit of a ~different~ structure, which I've gone back and forth on forever, but eventually ended up going with it because it felt right for the pace of the story, so I hope you don't mind it. 
> 
> Also, hey, look at this -- my backlog of chapters is actually coming in handy for a somewhat fast update. Thank you, Nano.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who left me comments on the last chapter! Hope you like this one, too. Enjoy.

Friday nights became an anchoring point in Kevin’s existence; a sole source of light that cast just enough of a beam onto the rest of the week to guide him out of the darkness. 

The location varied slightly every week, out of agreed upon necessity. Kevin held his cards close to his chest in regards to the General and all the gritty details of his life beyond their weekly shared hotel rooms, but he let Connor know enough to understand there was someone else calling the shots behind their arrangements, and that the _someone else_ in question was someone to evade at all costs. For that reason, Connor made a new fake profile every week and found a different motel to book at each time.

But no matter the neighborhood they landed in that week, there were a set of constants that Kevin began to expect as normalcy. A routine. There were the spreads of cheap dinners Connor always had waiting for him on the TV stand, the folded pajamas on the corner of the bed, and the packets of weak-but-complimentary coffee that they eventually turned into their own private ranking game of worst-to-most-tolerable across all the motels they visited (the Edgebrook Hotel was the worst, and the Motel 6 came through with a surprising lead). 

Connor started bringing more of his homework, too, and Kevin tore through the novels he supplied when he wasn’t helping him with it. Connor seemed even more happy about it than Kevin was, always so enthusiastic about the next one he would bring from his collection, throwing Kevin into the world of pirates and royalty, wizards and dystopian rulers, romance and friendship and unrequited love. Kevin wasn’t complaining. The escape from reality was… refreshing. Like a lungful of fresh air after stepping off a long bus ride. Most of the books would have been banned in the Price household growing up, and somehow, the pinch of rebellion made it that much more enticing. Most of all, he appreciated that the stories allowed for an alternative to sleep, which he still tried not to do too much of in front of Connor. 

He showered without the fear of a creaking bathroom door, ate without feeling like he would have to earn the food, and rested on a bed that was all his own, knowing he wouldn’t be touched.

Kevin didn’t take a minute of it for granted.

Connor was always apologizing for something, be it the quality of the room, the temperature of the food, or the mundaneness of their weekly activities. When the cost of takeout food started to add up, Connor would sometimes bring a free meal from the diner he worked at, or once even some homemade soup and sandwiches he had packed in a little tin lunch box, and he’d apologized for that, too. He genuinely didn’t seem to understand that every part of their routine, “mundane” or simple as they might have seemed to him, was the best thing to happen to Kevin in a really long time.

That was a really good thing, Kevin decided. He was glad Connor didn’t fully comprehend the immeasurable value of a proper meal, because that meant he’d never had to go a full week without one. The fact that Connor viewed something as simple as doing homework as _torturous_ meant that he had never been subjected to far worse ways to pass time in a hotel bed. And Kevin was really, really grateful for that. 

He was getting to know Connor more, little by little, and each new glimpse into the boy somehow both confirmed everything he expected and managed to surprise him all at once.He already knew Connor was kind and selfless from the time he spent his twenty-first birthday eating room service with a stranger, but he _didn’t_ know that he had a razor-sharp wit and an even sharper tongue, and that talking to him sometimes felt like reading an old, favorite book without ever coming off as pretentious or talking down to him.

He also learned that Connor was really, truly unhappy with his life, even if he never said it outright. 

The mental and emotional claustrophobia of being stuck under his parents’ roof looked a lot like a snapshot of how Kevin had felt at eighteen, just before he ran. Connor’s situation was a bit different, but maybe not by as much as he would have guessed. His parents weren’t thrilled about his sexuality any more than Kevin’s had been, though to Kevin’s knowledge, there had been no threats of sending him away to be “fixed” on Connor’s end. Not that he’d mentioned.That didn’t mean their relationship wasn’t strained. 

The plan was only for him to live at home until he finished community college and could afford to transfer to a university of his choice, but he couldn’t get out of his hometown fast enough. Connor was so lonely there. Kevin could read it plainly in the way he spoke of home, of the people around him, or in some cases, the lack thereof. Kevin had only had the _true pleasure_ of meeting Connor’s “friends” once, on the night they had hired him as Connor’s birthday gift and made him strip as some sort of added bonus prank to the whole exchange, so he didn’t require much explanation on why he might be unsatisfied in the friendship department. 

There were times he would catch Connor off guard in a moment of genuine laughter — over something in a movie or his own mistake on a homework problem — and Kevin couldn’t help but wonder if he felt a little less lonely when he was with him.

It was something of a relief, though maybe selfish to call it that; the idea that somehow, possibly, Kevin wasn’t the only person benefiting from their tucked-away Friday nights together. That Connor had been telling the truth when he told Kevin he just liked spending time with him. That maybe he considered Kevin a _friend._

That was a nice thought, if he let himself believe it.

* * *

**_Friday, November 8th_ **

Connor looked up at the sound of soft snoring coming from the bed next to him. He pushed his glasses up his nose, squinting away from the harsh light of the laptop he’d been staring at for too long. 

Kevin had fallen asleep reading, his most recent borrowed book propped open against his chest, his head tilted back against the headboard. Connor was suddenly glad he had remembered to bring one of his oversized hoodies this time after catching Kevin rubbing his hands over his arms to keep warm last week, because the sight before him was… something he didn’t dare put a name to. The shirt was normally a little big on Connor, which meant it was even bigger on Kevin’s thin frame, swooping nearly midway down his thighs, the sleeves overtaking his hands completely. He looked so warm. He looked almost _content._ Evidently he had been comfortable enough to even doze off, which made Connor probably happier than it should have, but it was such a rare occurrence for that boy to get anywhere near an adequate amount of rest. 

Some selfish part of him thought, or maybe just hoped, that he was able to sleep because he finally felt safe with Connor. Whatever the reason, he was glad for it. 

Grabbing the remote from the nightstand, he switched off the television, which had been scrolling through the end credits of their second Disney movie of the night, and forfeited the room to silence. He reached over and flicked off the small light that hung over Kevin’s side of the bed, watching shadow fall over his sleeping face. He adjusted his laptop back into position on his legs, ready to buckle down again and crank out the rest of his English Lit paper, but he found his eyes pulling almost magnetically back to the boy across from him. 

After a moment of deliberation, Connor set his computer off to the side, his knees and ankles cracking as he unfolded them to swing over the side of the bed. Carefully, quietly, he crossed the gap between the beds, hesitating with a hovering hand before gently pulling the book away from his chest. Slender fingers that just barely poked out of the sleeves fell lightly against his chest as Connor dogeared the page he left off on, setting the book on the nightstand.

He considered him for a moment, standing back with his hands on his hips. Kevin’s lips were parted just enough for a light whistle to escape with each steady exhale of breath, the muscles in his face completely at ease for what had to have been the first time since Connor met him. 

There wasn’t much he could do to adjust his position without risking potentially waking him up, no matter how stiff his posture looked propped against the headboard, but the least he could do was try to make him as comfortable as possible. Carefully, watching for any signs of stirring, Connor pulled the edge of the thick, white comforter up as far as it would go, laying it gently over where Kevin’s fingers rested against his chest. Connor’s hands lingered for just an extra moment before he pulled back. 

“Get some rest, buddy,” he whispered.

He crawled back into his respective bed and propped the laptop back onto his knees, checking the word count at the bottom of his window. He was still a thousand words short on his essay, and he could feel the heavy weight of sleep pulling at his eyelids already, but he took a sip of the bitter, lukewarm coffee on the nightstand and vowed to get through it.

* * *

**_Friday, November 15th_ **

“What happened to you?”

Kevin could feel, rather than see, Connor's eyes drop to his arms as soon as he opened the door, and he suddenly resented his threadbare short sleeves for more than their inadequacy against the falling temperatures.

“I’m fine.” Kevin kept his own gaze leveled toward the carpet as he stepped into the room, kicking off his shoes in the corner. “I had a bad night.”

“A bad…? Kevin, you… you’re _covered_ in bruises.” Connor closed the door behind them and they made their way into the room. 

“It’s not a big deal,” Kevin insisted.  
He hated talking about this with Connor. His Friday nights with him were the one night a week, the _only time,_ Kevin got to feel like something other than a body. Something more like a whole person. The last thing he wanted to do was paint Connor even more of a vivid picture of what Kevin’s life looked like when they weren’t together. Inevitable as it was, he hated the thought of Connor thinking about him that way at all, let alone harboring the mental image of what the man had done to him the night before.

“Was this…?” Connor swallowed nearly hard enough for Kevin to hear it. “Did one of your, um, clients…?”

Kevin wilted under a white-hot flood of shame. “Yeah.” He nodded. “He wanted, um. He was just... rough. With me.”

Connor pulled his bottom lip in between his teeth, watching Kevin in a way that made his skin burn under the gaze. “Kevin.” He stopped to take a deep breath. “I know you don’t like to talk about it, but… if you decide you want to go to the police, to get help, the offer is always on the table. I’ll go with you. You know I will.”

“Connor...”

“I know,” he said, resolute in a way that twisted Kevin’s stomach with guilt. “I know, I won’t push it, okay? I just hate seeing you like this. I hate knowing what you go back to every time you leave here.”

“It’s not always like this.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s great.”

Kevin didn’t argue with that.

“Is there anything I can do to make it better?” Connor asked meekly. When Kevin looked up to meet him, there were tiny splotches of red forming under the pale skin at the corners of Connor’s eyes. “Anything at all?”

“Let’s just…” Kevin exhaled heavily through his nose. “Do something else, to take my mind off of it. I don’t want to think about it tonight. Please.”

Connor nodded eagerly. “Yeah. Yeah, okay, we can do that.” He cleared his throat, and when he turned around to grab his backpack from the chair in the corner, Kevin pretended not to see him swipe at his eyes. “Lucky for you, I have come prepared with a full stock of distractions.”

He lifted his calculus textbook into view. A smile pulled at Kevin’s mouth, even as the split in his bottom lip protested at the movement.

“Trying to make me understand mathematical concepts is a full time job. I assure you, your mind will be fully consumed.”

Kevin sank down on the edge of the bed, trying to conceal the outward cringe of pain. “I’m up for the challenge.”

* * *

_How to help someone who is being trafficked._

The words stared back at him from the Google search bar, cruel in the calculated realness that he couldn’t look away from once it was spelled out in black and white. 

That was what Kevin was, right? _Trafficked._ Even if it didn’t look the way it did in the movies. He wasn’t a woman or a child (though certainly not much older than one). He wasn’t being carted through back alleys of third-world countries or delivered to him in chains. 

It wasn’t the first time he had made this particular Google search since finding Kevin. He had been desperate to help him in some way, to offer him an exit route, to offer him _anything at all_ , from the first day they met, but every time he dared to go as far as doing this research, he hit the same wall. It was a wall that Kevin himself had built, plastered between them, when he begged Connor not to go to the authorities. As long as Connor chose to honor that wish, there was essentially nothing he could do. Well. Nothing, beyond continuing to offer him one night of pretend-freedom a week, which he fully intended to do.

Maybe he would have been able to do more if Kevin wasn’t such a closed book. Not that… God, not that he _blamed_ him for any of it. If he had seen the things Kevin had in his own life, he probably wouldn’t be so quick to open up either. Still, Connor felt so helpless with an empty artillery of information and not even the first clue of how he could go about finding him help. 

The internet supplied him with a short list of shelters in the Chicago area, mostly targeted toward women and children, but there were some for which Kevin fit the criteria. There was a limit to those, though, and really, Connor didn’t even know if Kevin was considered _homeless._ He was clearly being… kept somewhere currently, but it was a bit of a broad assumption to think that he had only come to be where he was now out of homelessness. Maybe he had a whole family out there, somewhere, waiting on their son to come back to them. Maybe he had been taken, or run away, or fell in with the wrong crowd and made one too many bad decisions that somehow landed him where he was. 

Connor realized, beyond some vague commentary on his past associations with the LDS church and his sexual orientation (which he could probably draw his own conclusion on), he didn’t know much about Kevin’s life at all. And really, he didn’t know if it was quite his place to ask. 

He stared down at the hotline number at the top of his screen; the one he’d practically memorized from looking at it so often, yet never mustered the nerve to call, unsure of what he would say or if he would be any help at all. Or worse yet, if his interference would only get Kevin in more trouble. That was mostly what held him back from moving forward despite Kevin’s request not to. 

Crystal clear memories of the bruises that had covered Kevin’s arms and neck and god-knows-where-else last week flashed before his eyes, bleeding into the phone number he had stared at so long his eyes started to sting from the brightness of the screen. He blinked hard and turned away, hoping to any god that might hear him, that he wouldn’t come to regret not making the call.

* * *

**_Friday, November 22_ **

Connor’s eyes cracked open at the first sound of something distinctly _not right._ His sleep-sogged brain caught up to him at the sharp inhale of breath from the other side of the room. He pushed his head up and squinted into the darkness to see Kevin twisting against his sheets.

Another nightmare. 

He hadn’t had one, not in front of Connor, since the first night they spent together. That was after Kevin started allowing himself to sleep in front of him at all. As Connor sat up in bed, he sent up a silent prayer that this instance wouldn’t be another setback.

He flipped on the night table lamp and approached the side of Kevin’s bed, dropping into a crouch. The outward display of panic didn’t seem to be quite as escalated as it had the first time, and Connor was determined to pull him out of it before he got to that point. 

“Hey,” he said, placing a palm against his shoulder. The movement stilled under the touch, just briefly, before he jerked again, a soft whimper escaping. “It’s alright.”

Hesitantly, Connor slid his palm up to cup the side of his face, turning it gently toward him. His thumb gently brushed a sweaty tendril of hair away from his cheek as he tried to coax him out of his sleep, raising his voice enough to hopefully puncture through his unconsciousness.

“You’re okay, Kevin, it’s just a dream.”

When his eyes shot open, wide and bloodshot, it was with a choked off gasp, as if the air was caught in his throat, not quite reaching his lungs. It evidently only served to exacerbate the panic, because Kevin’s hand shot up to clasp the wrist of the hand that Connor still had against his cheek; not in an effort to push it away, but a desperate, silent plea for help. 

“Breathe,” Connor instructed, his own voice coming out mercifully more steady than he felt. “Try and take a deep breath for me.”

Under his palm, Kevin nodded, the fingers around his wrist clamping tighter as he struggled to pull in a shaky breath. 

“There you go.” Connor nodded, rubbing the soft pad of his thumb over Kevin’s cheek. “That’s it. One more.”

This time he breathed with him, both of them filling their lungs together. The tension in his body visibly receded on the exhale, the grip on Connor’s hand falling away. Connor followed suit, dropping his palm to the mattress. He let Kevin take a few more full breaths before attempting to speak.

“You okay?” He asked, finally. 

There was only a moment of hesitation before Kevin nodded. 

Connor could read the transparent apology written all over his face, in his flushed cheeks and downcast gaze, and he thought he might physically lose his dinner if he had to hear that boy say he was sorry for what just happened. Instead, he spoke up before Kevin could, letting the words fall from his mouth without much filter.

“Do you want to sleep with me?” His mouth popped open. “Shit. No, I— Did it make it better last time, I mean? Having, um… having me next to you after your nightmare?” At least Kevin wasn’t blushing alone now, but if he was at all perturbed by Connor’s question, he did a great job of masking it. His eyes flitted back up to Connor’s, shinier this time and even redder than they had been before. “God, that’s... That was a stupid thing to suggest. Just, nevermind that. Are you—?”

“Please.”

Connor blinked. “Please…?”

“It did help.” Kevin swallowed. “Having someone… um, having you...”

Connor was nodding before his brain could fully catch up. “Okay,” he said. “Yeah, let’s… yeah.”

He stood from his crouch, ignoring the pop in his knee, and hovered uncertainly beside the bed. Kevin wriggled back a few inches, making room and pulling the sheet back with him, and Connor took that as invitation enough. He pulled one long leg into the bed, then the other, feeling the full effect of his lanky, six-foot-two awkwardness as he slid into the sheets beside him.

“Is this alright?” he asked softly, one hand hovering over the edge of the blanket, waiting for Kevin’s cue to continue. The tears that had gathered moments earlier were running silently down the side of Kevin’s face, over the bridge of his nose and dripping onto the pillow. Connor made a point not to draw attention to it, though his own chest contracted painfully at the sight. “Just tell me what’s okay with you.”

Kevin nodded, pressing his lips together. “This is okay,” he said. 

Connor nuzzled into his own pillow, shifting around to try and get comfortable without knocking into Kevin. The room had advertised for two queen-sized beds, but now, close enough to feel the warmth radiating from Kevin’s skin beneath the thin sheets and every nerve ending in his body standing at full attention, Connor would wager anything that it was, at _most,_ a full.

“Do you want the light on?” Connor thought to ask before reaching back for the switch.

He shook his head. “Go ahead.”

Darkness dropped over them at the flick of a switch and Connor settled back into his spot. There was quiet for a long moment, save for the whispers of fabric as one or both of them shifted, the soft groan of the spring mattress beneath them. Then, piercing through the silence, thin and broken:

“Thank you.”

Connor’s throat tightened. He couldn’t even trust his own voice enough to manage a hum of acknowledgement, so instead he nodded against the pillow, hoping that even in the darkness Kevin could feel his response.

* * *

**_Friday, November 29th_ **

Kevin lay on his side, a lazy string of limbs covered in someone else’s too-big clothing. The bed was soft where it sank beneath his weight, enveloping his body like a welcomed embrace. Connor was across from him, propped up on one elbow so that his head eclipsed the bedside lamp in just the right way, creating a halo of golden light around his messy curls. Kevin thought he could have looked at that picture forever. 

They were sharing a bed this time. Connor had been nothing short of mortified when they showed up to the room to find the hotel had mistakenly booked him a single-bed room. His reaction might have been adorable, in the flustered way that Connor got sometimes, if he hadn’t also been so immediately, deeply apologetic. Kevin had assured him it was fine, that it wasn’t a big deal. Still, Connor made a valiant effort by going down to the front desk and trying to get it sorted out. 

Not that he would admit to it out loud, but Kevin couldn’t deny the tiny flame of relief he felt when Connor returned several minutes later with another apology and the news that the hotel had overbooked and that was the only room available.

He had been thinking about it all week; the way the dark waters that plagued Kevin’s nights were much more still when Connor was beside him. It was a memory he had carried with him from the first night they had met, and reawakened with their most recent night together. It wasn’t as if Connor’s presence chased away the nightmares entirely, but when he woke throughout the night with a scream trapped in his throat and phantom hands on his body, there was a warm, solid presence next to him that sounded like a purring cat when he snored and smelled like math homework and stale french fries and _safety._ And it was a little easier coming back down to earth with that.

They had abandoned their studying a while ago, finally throwing in the towel after hours of diligent focus (on Kevin’s part) and countless attempts at distraction (on Connor’s part). Connor’s exams were next week, and somehow Kevin felt way more invested than he should in a test that he would never take. The sense of pride he felt over Connor’s gradual improvement over the past few weeks was usually enough to outweigh the acrid sting of envy that lingered. 

Some rerun of a TV show neither one of them had seen was playing softly in the background, but they weren’t paying it any attention. Instead, they were just… talking. 

Connor told him more about his job. How he had started working at the diner as a busboy at seventeen and slowly worked his way up to host, and then server, where he could finally take home a decent earning of tips. He talked about how there were whisperings of bumping him up to assistant manager next year, but how he probably wouldn’t take it if they offered because something about it felt like signing the death certificate on his New York dreams and resigning himself to sticking around rural Illinois forever. 

He asked about Kevin’s family and didn’t press when he was reluctant to give too many details. Kevin told him he had a brother that looked just like him and a little sister who was six years younger but somehow smarter than both of them put together. He told him how he missed them, so much, and wondered aloud if they ever thought about him. About where he went. He wondered if they missed him, too.

When Connor asked about his parents, Kevin felt the iron chains around his throat constricting, all the pain and the fear and regret closing in around him. He managed to tell him about coming out of the closet at eighteen and watching the pride and affection his parents always held for him slowly drain out of their eyes, day after day. He had to close his eyes when he spoke of the night his mother, teary-eyed and weary under the dim light above the kitchen table, presented him with an informational packet about _a really great program, Kevin, your father and I really think these people could help you. Don’t worry we’ve already set everything up. No, Kevin, it isn’t up for debate._

He told him about sneaking out in the middle of the night with only a backpack and the money he had saved from his shitty grocery store job and taking the first bus out to Chicago. It all sounded so glaringly naive when he told the story out loud, but he supposed that was exactly what he had been.

Connor listened to all of it without judgement, his eyes warm and glistening with something that surpassed sympathy; something more like understanding, as if he genuinely cared about each word of the story Kevin had to tell. 

Kevin’s bravery withered as he approached the point where he met Dominic, some instinctive, self-preservative part of him unwilling to bridge that gap in his history. Connor must have sensed his apprehension, because instead of prying for more or asking the inevitable question he had surely wondered of _how the hell did you get here,_ he changed the subject, seamlessly and effortlessly transitioning them away until Kevin’s breathing leveled out against the mattress, the iron chains loosening around his throat. 

Connor didn’t try to touch him, didn’t try to kiss him or inch closer or turn the evening into anything more than Kevin wanted it to be. He never did, which Kevin appreciated more than he could put into words, even though sometimes he got lost in the fleeting daydreams about what his hands might feel like in his hair, on his waist, his hips, his thighs. He hadn’t spent a lot of the last year wanting those things from anybody, and he didn’t know what it said about him that he still could. A dull sense of shame was definitely up there, but maybe something like hope, too. Hope that maybe not all of him was broken after all.

* * *

**_Friday, December 6th_ **

There was a bottle of champagne and a six pack of beer on the nightstand when Kevin walked into the room. He looked at it, then to Connor, who smiled brightly back at him. 

“We’re celebrating,” he announced. Then, when Kevin raised an eyebrow in response, “Thanks to you, I passed my calc exams with flying colors.” Connor paused, his smile faltering just slightly. “Well, a C+. Which was as high as my colors were ever going to fly in that hell-class.”

Kevin felt a genuine swell of pride in his chest. “I knew you had it in you,” he said. “Sir Isaac Newton would be proud.” 

“Don’t bring him into this. He’s still on my shit list.”

Kevin eyed the display of booze on the nightstand once again. “I thought you didn’t drink.”

“I don’t.” Connor blinked. “Well, I haven’t. Yet. Twenty-one seems like as good a time as any to start, right? At least I’m only breaking one set of rules this way. Plus, you know, I figured if I’m going to get drunk for the first time, I should probably do it with a friend I trust. Not sure how much you remember about Eric and Steve, but they don’t exactly land in that category.”

Kevin’s breath hitched in his throat at the casual use of the word _‘friend,’_ but he pushed past it, keeping cool on the surface despite the warm feeling that settled itself behind his ribcage. “Right,” he said.

Connor bent down to retrieve two glasses from the lower shelf of the nightstand, handing one off to Kevin. He took it hesitantly and Connor must have sensed his apprehension, because when he stood back up, he met Kevin with a frown. 

“What’s wrong?”

Kevin blinked up at him from the glass. “What? Nothing.”

Hesitation flashed in Connor’s expression. “You don’t have to drink it if you don’t want to,” he assured him. “There’s no pressure or anything. I just thought… I don’t know. It might be fun.”

Images of less-kind strangers flashed in his memory, the other overnight clients, typically, who offered him alcohol when it was never so much an _offer_ as it was an _order,_ and the liquor was straight and strong and bitter on his tongue. He thought of the way it sometimes mixed with the pills the General gave him and made the world slip away even further from his grasp, and the way that didn’t always feel like a bad thing when he was with them. 

He took one look at Connor, who was watching him apprehensively, twisting the neck of the deep green champagne bottle in his hands, and knew this would be nothing like those other times. 

“Coffee _and_ alcohol, huh?” Kevin teased with a raise of his eyebrow. “I don’t know if there’s any coming back from that.”

Connor’s tension seemed to ease with the joke, his shoulders relaxing slightly. “Yeah, well. If we’re already a high smite-risk, we might as well go down swinging.”

“Cheers to that.”

The cork gave way with a loud pop, rocketing across the room to land somewhere in the tangle of curtains. 

“We’ve earned this,” Connor said. 

_“You_ earned this,” Kevin corrected, but Connor was having none of it. 

“No,” he countered. “I may have been the one physically taking the test, but you deserve at least seventy percent of that C+.”

“I think seventy percent of a C+ would be an F, so thanks for that.”

“Shhh, no more math, you’re missing the point.”

The bubbly liquid foamed to the top of Kevin’s glass as Connor poured, and Kevin took the opportunity to observe the candid moment of Connor’s happiness. The smile on his lips was genuine and soft, his eyes light and kind as they had been every time Kevin had the chance to look into them, and Kevin had a real moment of gratitude that he was here in this room with him; that whatever else the week held for him, he got to be here now. And for a moment, looking at Connor’s face, he could almost make himself believe that Connor was grateful to be here, too.

* * *

The warmth had settled over them like a sunset, starting in their chests and bellies and creeping outward into their limbs, their toes, their noses and fingers, laying them out in two lazy, sleepy heaps, their bones sinking into the mattress. They were side by side on the same bed, cutting across horizontally with both sets of legs dangling off the edge. They were close enough to touch, just barely, but far enough away that they didn’t. Kevin lay with both arms strung lazily up at his sides, bent at the elbow, open hands parallel with his head against the mattress. In the still quiet, Kevin could feel the slow, even movement of Connor’s breathing from beside him. He closed his eyes, losing himself in the comforting rhythm. 

“I have a confession to make.” It was Connor’s voice that broke the silence minutes later. Kevin opened his eyes, his head lolling lazily toward him. “I hate coffee.”

Kevin bubbled out a laugh. “What?” He felt light and dizzy in the best way as he rolled onto his side, propping up onto his elbow.

“Despise it,” Connor returned the laugh wholeheartedly, rolling up to mirror his position. “I don’t understand how you do it.”

Kevin pressed a palm to his mouth to stifle the giggle that wanted to escape. “But you drink it every week, I’ve seen you. Why do you...?”

Connor shrugged, shifting his gaze to the stretch of duvet between them as he traced a line of stitching with his index finger. A delightful pinkness crept into his cheeks from more than the alcohol consumption. “I didn’t want you to drink it alone.”

If Kevin’s heart thudded a bit harder in his chest then, it was probably just a side effect of the alcohol. 

“Is that why you put like, seven sugars in it? To mask the flavor from your delicate palate?” he cracked, and Connor looked back at him, his mouth open in feigned offense. 

“I do _not_ put _seven,_ Kevin.”

They both seemed to catch it at the same time, two smiles breaking out into full on giggles as they collapsed back onto the mattress again.

 _“Seven Kevin”_ Kevin echoed in a whisper. God, he was drunk.

“I’m a poet.”

“And you didn’t even know it.”

Connor snorted, a crass, uncensored sound that he definitely wouldn’t have made sober, and Kevin thought it was one of the best sounds he’d ever heard. 

“Stupid,” Connor remarked, swatting a haphazard hand in Kevin’s direction. 

It landed with a thump on the bed, incidentally close enough to Kevin’s that their pinky fingers overlapped. Warm skin twitched against cold at the contact, and when Connor turned his hand just slightly, his finger hooked around Kevin’s instead of pulling away. Maybe it was an accident or maybe he was too drunk to notice, but neither one of them made a move to separate.

Kevin was just starting to drift again when Connor spoke through a yawn. “Your turn,” he said.

“For what?” Kevin echoed the yawn.

“I gave you a confession, now you have to give me one.”

Kevin chuckled low in his throat, his eyebrows turning down. “I don’t remember agreeing to those terms.”

“Come onnnnnn,” he whined. “It’s only fair.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Anything. Whatever comes to mind. It doesn’t have to be as embarrassing as mine.”

Kevin didn’t bother to mention he hadn’t found Connor’s embarrassing in the slightest. Instead, he let his mind wander, trying to find what he wanted to say. Unfortunately for him, his brain needed no extra time to think, and alcohol was one hell of a force for breaking down all inhibitions, because he felt his mouth forming the words before he could stop them.

“I wish I could run away from here, like you want me to.”

He regretted it the second it left his mouth, because the air in the room seemed to freeze over at his words, Connor visibly stiffening next to him. In his periphery, Kevin saw him turn his head in his direction.

“Kevin.”

“Sorry,” he said immediately, eyes glued to the ceiling. “Sorry, I didn’t- I shouldn’t have said that.”

“If you want to talk about it…”

“I don’t,” Kevin said quickly. “Please. Please, let’s just drop it. I’m sorry I said that.”

Connor pulled in a deep breath, but eventually conceded with a nod. They fell back into a heavy silence, thicker this time than the comfortable, light one they had before, and Kevin hated himself for ruining the moment. It had been so nice while it lasted.

“Can I do a different confession?” Kevin dared to ask, his voice pinched tight. He was glad Connor was no longer looking at him to see the inevitable shimmer of tears he struggled to hold back.

“‘Course. Go for it.” 

Kevin pretended not to notice the sudden thickness in Connor’s voice. He swallowed, pressing down the sudden swell of nervousness in his chest. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”

There was the unmistakable sound of a sniffle, but Kevin didn’t dare turn his head to look. They both kept their eyes on the ceiling, even as Connor’s pinky unlatched from his, just long enough to slide his palm over Kevin’s fully, lacing all their fingers together. He gave a squeeze, and Kevin gave it right back. 

“Yeah,” Connor whispered. “You’re mine, too.”

* * *

Kevin’s breathing had leveled out some minutes ago, the near-constant crease that lived between his brows smoothed out in a display of peaceful slumber. Connor wasn’t far behind. He could feel his own eyelids starting to sag, dipping into his vision with each slow, lethargic blink as he gazed at the boy across from him. Some rational part of his mind — growing quieter by the second — urged him to get up and pull Kevin’s legs up onto the bed, to lift him into a proper position and cover him so they could both get a more restful sleep. He wanted to, but he was so, so, _delightfully_ drunk, and his limbs felt so heavy and somehow, he was comfortable right where he was. 

Mostly, the idea of letting go of Kevin’s hand for any amount of time, for any reason, was an absolute deal breaker. 

“My turn for a confession.” Connor let his eyes trail over the profile of his face; the long, sloped nose that slid into pink, perfect lips. Ridiculous fucking eyelashes that kissed the skin of his cheek with his eyes closed and a jawline that was just a little more pronounced than it should have been. Connor felt his hand tighten unconsciously around the boy’s next to him. The alcohol was a sedative quickly pulling him under, but Connor knew, even then, that wasn’t the reason for the warmth that flowered in his chest. “I think I’m falling in love with you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's not my birthday anymore, but your comments are still appreciated regardless :)


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two chapters in the same week? Give me a medal. 
> 
> For real though, I'm so happy to be fully reinvested in this story enough to have some chapters at the ready to post. This one definitely has a different vibe than the rest of the story so far, but I think it was a necessity to get to where we are going for the rest of the story. Hopefully y'all can jive with it. 
> 
> Thank you so much for your comments on the last one AND FOR THE AMAZING ART MADE BY THE INCREDIBLE MICHA. If you haven't seen it, please go here and give him all the love:
> 
> https://michasartdump.tumblr.com/post/636416497373396992/ho-ly-shiti-finally-finished-this-and-i
> 
> The last chapter (specifically the ending) was one of my favorite parts of the whole story so far, and I was so happy you guys all felt the same way about Connor's little confession. Now, to muddy the waters a bit...

The bathroom was hazy-white by the time Kevin turned the handle, cutting off the spray of water. His body tingled in the immediate absence of the heat, tiny pin pricks over the surface of his skin. If he would have looked down, he was sure there would have been glaring red skin where soft pale should have been, evidence that the temperature of his showers were far hotter than what was probably healthy, but he didn’t care. He never went out of his way to look at his body, anyway. 

These showers were such a rarity for him, and one of the parts of their Friday night routine he was most thankful for. It was the only time Kevin got to shower with no limitation on time or temperature or privacy. More than that, it was the only time there was no expectation of hearing the groan of the bathroom door pushing open, footsteps on cold tile, someone pulling back the curtain to press him into the corner. If Connor had noticed his ingrained habit of leaving the bathroom door cracked open in the beginning, he hadn’t said anything. And more importantly, he had never taken him up on the opportunity.

Even as a kid, Kevin had always liked his showers a little too hot. Somewhere in his mind were distinct memories of his mother getting after him for looking like a lobster when he got out. It was almost comforting, in some small way, to feel a thread of connection to the kid that existed in his memory when there was so little else they had in common anymore. Even this, the shared enjoyment of something as simple as a hot shower, was tainted if he let himself think about it. Sure, he still liked them because of the innocent way the heat sent shivers down his spine as it melted the cold out of his skin, but now there was a coldness somewhere much deeper in him that the water couldn’t touch, no matter how high he cranked up the temperature. Now, he could only dream of chasing the feeling of being clean, because he was pretty sure he would never have the real thing again. He thought he might be forgetting what it felt like.

The silver rings on the shower curtain screeched along the rod as he pushed it aside, grabbing a towel from the shelf above the toilet. He pressed his face into it first, appreciating the softness against his skin, even at the lower end hotels. He dried himself off quickly, not unaware of the slight sting of friction across his irritated skin, and hung the towel on the hook on the back of the door. 

Connor’s pajamas were folded in a neat pile on the corner of the sink, just where he’d left them. He brought the sweatshirt again; the dark maroon one that hung off Kevin’s frame like branches on a weeping willow, frayed bits of thread along the sleeve caps from obvious years of wear. Without thinking about it, Kevin brought the shirt to his chest, the fabric bunched between his fists, and dropped his head to inhale the familiar scent. He had yet to put a name to this feeling, the one he was slowly losing himself in beyond all control, but it was getting harder and harder to stave off. 

Perhaps because there was a much larger part of him that desperately did not want to. 

The smell of Connor encompassed him as he pulled the hoodie over his head, letting the material fall over his body to where it landed at his upper thighs. He paused, then wiped his palm over the mirror to clear away some of the heavy condensation. Through the haze of steam, the reflection that stared back at him looked like it could have been from a dream. He wished it were one. There were parts of him that were unrecognizable to the person he used to be. The legs that stretched out from the hem of the sweatshirt were pale and thin, all the tan, wiry muscle from years of cross country and soccer diminished under the weight of the year he had lived. He’d lost some weight around his stomach, his arms, his face-- places where he didn’t really have much to lose from to begin with. Now he just looked kind of sickly. 

And in a way, he probably was. All the daily pills, the food insecurity, the lack of a regular sleep schedule… it had to have taken a serious physical toll on his body. Probably more of one than he typically allowed himself to think about, but looking in the mirror made it difficult to ignore. So he looked away. 

He was reaching for the pajama bottoms when Connor’s voice, muffled and pitched up in a way he didn’t often hear, pulled his attention from the other side of the door.

_“...know it’s expensive. Yes, I know. It was just a… Mom, it was just an informational packet! I haven’t even officially applied yet.”_

Kevin busied himself with redressing, folding his own dirty clothes into a neat pile, but it was impossible not to overhear his conversation through the thin walls. 

_“Well, we don’t know that for sure. There’s always financial aid and scholarships and… Yeah, I know it seems like I’m working a lot, but it’s not that bad. My coworkers are nice, and it’s… it’s just a few double shifts.”_

Once again, the tiny seeds of guilt that had planted themselves in Kevin’s consciousness rooted outward in a sharp tangle. It wasn’t the first time he had heard Connor mention picking up hours at work, and certainly not the first time he had managed to work himself up over the idea that _he_ was a direct cause of whatever financial distress Connor was facing. Somehow, though, it hadn’t really occurred to him until now that these weekly financial setbacks could be seriously hindering his future plans.

_“I_ am _still focusing on school. I can do both at once. I’ll have to do it in New York City, too, you know. A lot of people my age work full time in school.”_

Full time? Had Kevin known that? He knew he worked a lot, but… no wonder he was always so tired on Fridays.

Guilt won out, or maybe he just selfishly couldn’t listen to any more of the problems he had inadvertently caused, and Kevin flipped the faucet on the sink, letting the running water drown out the rest of the conversation. 

When he was pretty sure he heard silence on the other side of the door, he cut the water and took one last look at himself in the mirror, draped in the borrowed clothes, and turned the lights off.

Connor was sitting at the edge of the furthest bed when Kevin came out of the bathroom, his hair messy in the distinct way it got after he had been running his fingers through it. He was used to seeing that look on him after a particularly gruesome calculus worksheet, but the visual was much less appealing when he knew where the stress was coming from this time. 

“Hey,” Connor greeted him with a smile that Kevin tried hard to return. 

Kevin sank down on the edge of the opposite bed, his back turned toward Connor. He fiddled with the socks in his lap, unfolding them to put on, mostly as a distraction from looking directly at him.

“Pizza should be here in ten,” he said, and Kevin heard some shuffling behind him, like Connor was moving around. “I’m glad we decided to switch things up this time. There’s only so many times you can eat cold french fries before they start to wear on the soul.”

The laugh Kevin attempted came out as more of a hum, and the movements behind him paused. 

“Hey, you okay?” Connor asked, his voice returning to the low, familiar tone Kevin was used to hearing. Suddenly, his own throat felt tight. 

“Fine,” he tried, but even he could hear how unconvincing that sounded. 

He heard the familiar chime of the Harry Potter keychains on Connor’s backpack -- one for each of the four houses, he had tried to explain, once -- knocking together as he set it on the ground. Kevin didn’t need to turn around to know that his auburn eyebrows were probably drawn together with that adorable crease in between them. 

“What’s wrong?” Connor made no move to crowd his space, which Kevin appreciated as always, but he could practically feel the burn of his gaze searing through his back. The sting behind his eyes was building to an intensity he wouldn’t be able to contain much longer. He had several responses queued up and ready to fire back at him with perfect composure; a thousand different ways to say _‘I’m fine’_ that he had mastered over the course of a year for the sake of survival. But none of them could get past the lump in his throat. 

“Kevin?”

None of them but the truth.

“I don’t think we should do this anymore.”

If perfect stillness had a sound, like that of water freezing over to ice, it would have been the silence that followed his words. 

“What do you mean?” Connor’s said, soft and breathless. Guilt coiled tighter in Kevin’s chest. 

“I… appreciate what you’ve been trying to do,” Kevin spoke each word slowly. “But we both knew this was never a permanent arrangement.”

He was still facing away from Connor, his eyes flat and detached in the direction of the wall, but he could hear him shifting uneasily behind him. He could practically feel him fighting the urge to come closer. 

“Maybe… maybe not _permanent,_ no, but…” Connor paused, something like genuine hurt slipping into his tone. “Why now? Did I… did I do something?”

His eyes slipped shut. Of course. Of _course_ Connor’s first instinct was to put his own head on the chopping block somehow.

Kevin’s body trembled with the urge to retaliate against the absurd suggestion. He wanted so desperately to take it all back, to pretend he’d never said anything at all, because he knew, he _knew_ he was setting himself up for one hell of a fall, and the landing was going to hurt like a bitch. But he could deal with that, he _would,_ if it meant shielding Connor from all of this; from himself and the money problems and the constant periphery of danger that followed everywhere he went. 

“This just isn’t good for us.” Kevin set his jaw. “Neither of us.”

There was another gap of silence, and then...

“No.” 

Both the response and the firmness in Connor’s voice was enough to shock Kevin into turning around to face him. Connor stood with his arms crossed over his chest, his feet set apart in a front of defiance even as his lip visibly trembled from across the room. 

“I’m not going to just… cut you off. After all this time? Why would I… How could I do that?”

The muscles in Kevin’s face twitched as he struggled to uphold his resolve. The perfect response, the one he knew would hit right where he needed it to, was coiled and poised on his tongue, ready to strike, but some lingering thread of self preservation that rallied against his self destruction ached to hold it in. 

“Connor,” he groaned, almost a low growl under his breath. Beneath his borrowed sweatshirt, his heartbeat pounded against his ribcage, dread and adrenaline flooding his veins with each pump. 

“No,” Connor said again, his voice gaining mild strength. “No, I’m not… I’m not going to just _drop_ you like that, Kevin.”

The last bit of his resolve broke, and he let the words fall out of his mouth before he could stop them. 

“I guess I don’t get much say in it, do I?” He forced himself to look up into Connor’s eyes as he spoke, watching the horrified flash of recognition land on him. “It’s really your choice. You make the arrangement, and I’ll be here next week.” He swallowed. “Whether I want to or not.”

It was low, and he knew it, and maybe _he_ was low for going there with Connor and knowing it would work. And for a moment, he really thought it had, until Connor surprised him for a second time.

“What is this?” He took a step closer to the bed where Kevin sat, sinking down onto the corner across from him. “You know I wouldn't do that. You know I wouldn’t… _force_ you to be here if I knew you didn’t want to be.” 

Kevin turned his head back toward the wall. He closed his eyes and caved. “I know.”

The admission alone seemed to bring at least some minimal relief, as he could practically feel the bed shift under Connor’s release of tension. 

“So tell me what you’re trying to do here,” he spoke quietly. 

“I’m _trying_ to do the right thing.” His voice bordered on desperate.

“For who?” Connor challenged. “What’s really going on?”

He was grateful he had chosen then to turn away, because there was no stopping the hot stream of tears that spilled over onto his cheeks. He could keep up the fight, and probably should, for Connor’s sake, but Kevin was so damn tired. He was _so_ tired, and the pills were a heavy fog in his brain like the hazy-white bathroom steam, and he didn’t want to fight, especially with Connor. 

“I heard you,” he confessed, not bothering to hide the blur of tears in his voice. “On the phone, just now.”

Connor blew out an audible puff of air. “Okay,” he breathed. “Well, that… that makes more sense. What exactly did you hear?”

“Enough,” Kevin answered, wiping at his eyes with the back of his - well, Connor’s - sleeve. “Enough to know that you’re struggling because of what we’re doing here. Because of me.”

Connor turned to face him straight on, pulling one knee up onto the bed to do so. “Kevin, what you heard was…” He shook his head, laughing quietly, exasperatedly, to himself. “It was one of… _many_ battles in a several-year war. One that I’ve been fighting long before I met you.”

“It doesn’t change the fact that I’m putting another obstacle in your path.”

“Stop that.” His voice was firm enough to make Kevin’s eyes lift to his. He winced apologetically without backing down. “Let’s get one thing straight: _You_ haven’t _done anything._ Okay? This… _none_ of this has been your fault.”

“You’re throwing hundreds of dollars away for this every week,” Kevin argued, unsure of how he was managing to find so much stamina to fight a battle he desperately didn’t want to win. “Dollars that could be, _should be,_ going toward New York City and… and everything you’ve been working so hard for.”

“I’m not throwing anything away, Kevin. Not my dreams, and not you either. You’re not disposable.”

“You sound so sure.”

Connor fell silent beside him. “After all this time?” There was a genuine twinge of hurt in his voice. “You really think that’s how I feel about you?”

“I just…” Kevin pinched his eyes shut. “I don’t want you sticking around out of some misplaced guilt. You don’t owe me anything, Connor. At all. We just... met by chance, and you were kind to me. That could be enough.”

“We met,” Connor corrected, his eyes alight, “because my dumbass excuses for friends couldn’t spot a red flag if it slapped them in the face, and every day I’m so glad that happened. I don’t even know what I believe in anymore -- higher powers and fate and all that -- but I believe our paths were meant to cross. I’m _glad_ they did.” He paused, pulling his own gaze to his lap. “And… I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready for them to separate.”

In Kevin’s periphery, Connor’s hand nudged slightly closer to his on the bed, landing inches away in an unspoken invitation. He watched it, remembering vividly the feeling of his fingers brushing against his in their blissfully drunken haze the week before; a burn on his skin he hadn’t stopped feeling since. 

Suddenly the air in the room between them felt thicker, the silence weightier than before. Kevin’s own fingers twitched at the memory, or perhaps the anticipation, of the touch. Like some invisible, magnetic force pulling him, he wanted nothing more than to reach out and hold the thing that felt so forbidden to him. The person he couldn’t have without hindering him. The person he didn’t deserve, but who was here anyway, fighting to keep him around with a hand outstretched like an olive branch Kevin so desperately wanted to take. 

He was close, so close, to breaking out of his own head and just _going for it_ when the shrill ring of the hotel phone split the bubble of tension down the middle. Both of their hands jerked back at the same time. Kevin could have sworn he heard Connor swear under his breath as he bolted to his feet.

“I’ll get it,” he said; unnecessary, as he was already halfway across the room to the phone. “Hello?” he picked up. “Yeah, this is he. Oh. Right, yeah, that’s me. Okay, thanks. I’ll be down.”

He hung up and, with what looked to be a considerable conscious effort, brought his eyes up to meet Kevin’s.

“The pizza’s down in the lobby,” he said, his voice far more strained and gravelly than such an announcement required. Kevin just barely held onto a snort of absurd laughter at their unlucky timing. “I’ll go grab it, just… shit. Okay. We’ll talk some more when I get back, alright? We’ll talk about this.”

Kevin only nodded, his heart still hammering in his chest. Connor grabbed his shoes and his key card, then stopped halfway to the door, turning back to him as if something had just occurred to him.

“You’re not… gonna like, run off on me, are you?” 

The look on his face was so genuinely concerned, and once again, if the circumstances hadn’t been so heavy, Kevin might have laughed. Instead, he offered a weak smile and shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’ll, um. I’ll be here.”

Connor deflated with a sigh of relief, then nodded. “Glad to hear it.” 

Then he was out the door. Kevin’s face fell into his hands the second he was gone. 

Suffocated by the sudden silence of an empty room, Kevin sobbed; one broken, strangled sound that led to another until he was weeping openly into his hands without really knowing why. Perhaps it was the lingering guilt that remained despite Connor’s assurances. Maybe they were tears of relief, wrought with inexplicable gratitude that his attempts to push Connor away hadn’t worked. He had refused to take the easy out Kevin had served up on a silver platter, and instead decided to push back. To _fight_ for him in a way no one had ever bothered to do.

Or maybe he was crying out of grief for the version of them that could have existed, had they met in another world, another timeline where his reality didn’t look like this.

He sat up when he heard the faint beep of the key card at the door, swiping his eyes with his shirt sleeve. He looked up at Connor through bloodshot eyes as he crossed the room to place the pizza box on the TV stand, his back turned to him. Connor paused there, his arms rod-straight where he gripped onto the lip of the stand, his head bowed. 

They were quiet. Kevin watched him, waiting to hear what he had to say, if he had finally decided to take Kevin up on his offer to cut him off. Finally, Connor turned around, shifting his weight back against the wooden frame. 

“I…” Connor swallowed hard, his hands worrying at each other in front of him. “I know how you feel about this, so don’t get mad, okay?” Kevin swallowed, then nodded. “I’ve, um, been doing some reading. Research, I guess. About resources, shelters, ways to get help for… um. For people who are stuck in situations like yours.”

Kevin couldn’t help it; a humorless chuckle escaped him as he shook his head, turning slightly away so Connor couldn’t see whatever his face was trying to betray. “You say that like it’s so easy.”

“No, not easy.” Connor shook his head. “But don’t you think it’s worth a shot?”

“No.” _Not if he knew what was at stake._ “Not really.”

“If you’re afraid of…” Connor paused, breathing out sharply. “Of getting hurt, or… the police will protect you, Kevin. You’ll be safe.”

“The police will take one look at me and see a drug addicted whore.” _That was all they had seen in every other run-in he’d had,_ his brain reminded him, dredging up memories of a weekend in a jail cell he would rather forget. 

“Don’t.” The ferocity in Connor’s eyes was suddenly strong enough to burn, even through the film of tears that suddenly shone there. “Don’t talk about yourself like that.”

“I’m sorry, which part of it was wrong?”

“You didn’t choose this! You told me yourself, you don’t want to be here.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m here regardless.”

Connor took a deep breath, as if to pull himself back from something that almost resembled anger. Not at Kevin, necessarily, but still, something so jarring to see break through Connor’s gentle demeanor. 

“Do you know that I think about you every single day after we leave here? That I don’t, _can’t_ stop thinking about you until I see you again?” Connor’s voice was low, barely above a whisper. “It kills me to sit back and watch you walk away every week, knowing what you go back to. Knowing I don’t do anything to stop it.”

Kevin shook his head, his own voice wavering. “There’s nothing you can do, Connor. It isn’t up to you to fix this for me.”

“Why can’t you just let me _try?”_

Tears were escaping through his pinched eyelids again, his heart hammering in his chest. “Connor, please, I can’t...”

He heard him cross the room in three long strides, felt the mattress dip from the same distance as before. “Tell me why,” Connor implored. “Help me understand.”

Kevin’s fingers were trembling where he clutched around the comforter, the tension a permanent fixture in his body. There was something rising to the surface, something he couldn’t stop if he wanted to, and it burned like lava through him, over him, enveloping him. He felt all of it, all at once; all the pain and the secrets and the lies he kept locked up for a year behind dull eyes and the lifeless smile of a boy named Leo. He wanted to tell somebody. He wanted to scream. He wanted _out, out, OUT._ He wanted… He wanted--

“...Kevin?”

“Because!” He was suddenly on his feet, his fists clenched at his sides. “Because the price of my freedom is someone I love suffering in my place! Because if I try to leave, if I even _look_ like I’m going to or step one foot out of line, he’ll fucking hurt _them_ instead of me, and as fucking terrible as things are right now, the possibility of that happening is even worse!”

The sound of his labored breathing was the only noise in the room after he choked on his last word. He gripped for the wall as he stumbled backward, his other hand clutching at his chest. There was a ringing in his ears, a tingling numbness spreading down into his fingertips. 

Connor blinked, his eyes widening before he could control his expression. “Hurt who?” he whispered.

Kevin’s head fell into his hands again, fingernails digging into his scalp. “I can’t,” he cried, his head shaking back and forth. “I can’t.”

Connor stood from the bed, making no move to crowd Kevin’s space. 

“Hey,” he addressed him carefully. “Look at me, please?” Kevin did, his vision blurring over with new tears as soon as he looked up. “You can tell me anything. You know that. Who would get hurt?”

He dropped his hands to his sides, defeated. 

“My siblings,” he whispered. The words on his lips summoned the images of his family that he tried hard to push down and away for the sake of his own sanity, but they were clear as day now, right in front of him. Flashes of his childhood. Memories of the last time he had seen them in person. The photos the General had shown him to buy his compliance. “My little brother and sister. He… The person who took me, he knows where they are, how to get to them. He showed me.” 

Connor didn’t say anything as Kevin struggled to catch his breath, just watching him clench and unclench his fists at his sides until he could get some of the tension in his muscles to subside. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter, pressed flat by the effort. 

“If I leave, if I fuck up, he’ll take them instead. I know he will. I’ve seen what he can do. What he… what he _has_ done. He’ll make them...” Kevin swallowed hard, unwilling to even verbalize the thought. “He’ll make them do what I do. Or he’ll kill them, and I… I don’t know which would be worse.” Connor winced. “But I can’t let that happen.”

The rest of the breath in his lungs expelled when he finished speaking, his mind and body feeling thoroughly wrung out from the weight of the confession. 

It was Connor who broke the following silence first, with a pronounced and concise: 

“Fuck.”

Kevin pitched forward with a humorless laugh. “Yeah. I guess that sums it up.” He took a step back to lean against the dresser, occupying the spot where Connor had stood minutes before. “But you see now. Why I can’t just…”

“Yeah,” Connor said thickly, nodding. “Yeah, I see.” He let out a deep breath of his own. “I’m sorry I pushed you. I just...”

“I know,” Kevin said. “It’s okay”

Suddenly the hotel room felt like a fallen battleground, and they were standing alone in the rubble as the dust settled around them. Connor ran a hand through his hair, messy curls fraying apart under his fingers and falling limply back against his forehead. He closed his eyes briefly, and when he opened them, he looked from the box of pizza on the dresser back to Kevin.

“You should eat something,” he said decisively, breaking the silence. 

And he wasn’t wrong. It had been days since Kevin had had a meal and he was starving, though every nerve in his felt like they’d just been scrubbed raw with a scouring pad, so he could only imagine the pizza would taste like sawdust in his mouth. Regardless, he didn’t have it in him to fight Connor, and easily sank back down onto the bed at his prompting.

The mix of adrenaline from the course of the evening and the drugs pumping through his system had his head swimming. If not for the sleepy gravity that the pills draped over him, he might have been pulled into a panic attack from his outburst alone, but instead he was stuck in some state of in-between where his ears were ringing, his head pounding, fingers trembling as he reached out to grab the plate that Connor was offering to him. Mindlessly, he grabbed a single slice of pizza and lowered the plate to his lap, unmoving. He could feel Connor’s eyes on him, watching him carefully, so he forced himself to take a bite.

“Are you alright?”

Yep, he was right about the sawdust thing, but he swallowed it down regardless, offering Connor a slight nod of his head. 

“Okay,” Connor replied, not sounding all that convinced. “Can I just… can I say one more thing about it, then I’ll let it go?”

Not really in the headspace to put up much more of a fight tonight, Kevin only nodded again. 

“I’m not going to pressure you, okay? But I want you to know,” Connor said, “if the time ever does come when you change your mind, whenever that may be, I’ll be here to help you. I don’t think it’s impossible, Kevin. I think there’s a chance you could get away from here and keep your little siblings safe, too. And I’ll do whatever I can to help you. If you choose it.”

He didn’t know what to say to that, so he took another bite of pizza, hoping that at least would appease him. Connor watched him for another moment before he was struck by some idea, leaping to his feet to retrieve the hotel-branded notepad and pen from the nightstand drawer. 

“What are you doing?” Kevin asked as Connor scribbled something just out of his line of sight. 

The perforated edge of the stationary tore seamlessly as Connor pulled it away and handed it across the bed. Kevin took it, and when he looked down, he saw a nine-digit phone number scrawled out in familiar, loopy handwriting. Below it, in an echo of the note he had left on the morning after their first meeting, he had written: 

_**Dear Kevin,  
Call me.  
Your friend,  
Connor.** _

He looked up.

“I know you don’t exactly have access to a phone, so maybe this is stupid.” Connor shrugged, setting the pad and pen off to the side. “But maybe, somehow… I don’t know. It’ll just make me feel better, knowing you might be able to reach me somehow. If you need to. If you can.”

Kevin sat his plate on the bed beside him and took extra care to fold the paper neatly into fourths, small enough to remain hidden in the front pocket of his jeans. He slid it in next to the half-used tube of chapstick, knowing there would probably never come a time where he would be able to use it. Still, the small offering burned warm in his pocket. Maybe it was, in fact, the thought that counted in this case. He gave Connor the strongest smile he could manage. “Thanks.”

They ate their pizza in relative silence, each swallow a little easier than the last as Kevin felt his appetite slowly returning to him, his nerves settling in the way they only seemed to do in Connor’s presence. He was reaching for a second slice when Connor looked up at him.

“Please, don’t do that again.”

Kevin froze mid-motion, his arm hovering out over the pizza box. “What?”

“That selfless martyr thing you just tried to pull,” he said. “Don’t be a hero. Not for my sake.” Kevin resisted the urge to correct him, to say that if there was any hero to be named in this story, it certainly wasn’t him. “Next time, just… talk to me first, before you go mapping out your exit strategy, okay?”

Connor’s voice was light and accented by the tug of a kind smile at his lips, but Kevin’s brain was stuck on the _‘next time._ The implication that Connor still wanted this thing between them - whatever it was - to continue, even after everything he just learned. 

“Um, yeah. Okay.” Kevin managed to keep the thick emotion out of his voice as he plated his second slice. He paused. “None of this assuages my concern for how this is affecting you, though.”

“I told you, I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think it was feasible.” 

“Feasible, maybe,” Kevin allowed. “But sustainable? Enjoyable? I don’t just want to be a burden on your existence.”

“You’re not--” 

“I know,” Kevin stopped him gently. “I know you don’t see it that way. Because you’re way too fucking nice to me.” He gave a pointed look when Connor made a move to object again. “You are. But no matter what you say, I’m always going to feel like that unless something changes. Do you get that?”

Connor’s shoulders slumped forward as he let out a long breath. “I do,” he said. “I get where you’re coming from. But maybe let’s find a compromise instead of going full ghost?”

“Okay.” Kevin nodded, shifting gears to strategize the situation. “Well, there isn’t really much we can do to change the price of… well. Me. An overnight is always going to be the same, but we could maybe just do a couple hours or something instead?”

“Next,” Connor said around a mouthful of pepperoni. Kevin quirked an eyebrow, and Connor shook his head as he swallowed. “Nope, not compromising on time. One night already goes by fast enough.”

Kevin tried really hard to ignore the flutter of… whatever that was happening in his stomach at those words. “Um. Alright, well…”

“What if we cut out the hotel cost?”

He tilted his head. “Like… your house instead?”

“No,” Connor laughed. “God, no. I wouldn’t subject you to meeting my parents and having to explain this whole situation. Also, it’s probably a bit out of the geographical range for where you could feasibly go for… um. This.”

Kevin looked briefly away. “Right.”

“But no. I meant… are there limitations to where you can go for a call? Like, if we were to just… go around in my car for the night? I can’t promise it would be the most enthralling evening of your life, but at least I would know you’re safe.”

A montage of old, upholstered leather seats in dark parking lots and murky puddles in back alleys that stained the canvas of his shoes and the knees of his jeans flashed in response to the question. He blinked away the images and smoothed out the tension in his muscles they provoked, forcing himself to remember where he was, to stay present. 

“Normally, there’s not… a ton of restriction on location,” he answered carefully. “Except for overnights. He needs an address, to know where I am.”

He chose to ignore the way the muscles in Connor’s jaw twitched under his pale skin.

“Okay,” he breathed. “Well, what if we give a fake address?”

Kevin’s stomach twisted at the very thought of taking that kind of risk, of openly defying his rules like that. It probably wouldn’t be enough of a fuck up to make him go after Jack and Kayla, but he had been on the receiving end of enough punishments from the General himself to know it wasn’t something he would like to experience again. 

“I have a driver,” he explained. _“He,_ has a driver. Someone hired to take us to our clients and back. So he would see where he dropped me off and picked me up.”

“Well, we should still be able to fake that in a hotel, right? He doesn’t come inside with you, does he?”

Kevin shifted uneasily on the bed. “No, not… not typically.”

“So we could just come inside, hide out in the lobby or something until the coast is clear, and then sneak out to my car. We can go wherever and get you back by morning. He wouldn’t know the difference, right?”

The immediate response, the conditioned one, was _yes, of course he will know, because he always knows, he always finds out, and it’s always always_ always _Kevin who gets hurt for it._ The followup, however, came from a much angrier, much darker place in his brain - from the broken shards of _Kevin Price_ that still existed somewhere, somehow, inside him that screamed with the need to rebel. To be reckless and brave and selfish for one night in a string of so many others in which he existed solely to be hurt.

“Where would we go?” he asked, a light buzz already building at his fingertips from the thought alone. 

“Anywhere.” There was a detectable gleam of something adventurous that flashed in Connor’s eyes. “We could go out for dinner, or maybe finally buy some _real_ coffee for once and just... take a walk around The Loop. It’ll be just like...”

_...like a date?_

The split second of eye contact was brief but intense before Connor broke away, the sharp edges of his cheeks glowing pink. Kevin could feel his heartbeat thick and heavy in his throat, rivaling the voice in his head that assured him someone like Connor would never think about dating someone like him. The reality was almost as cold and unforgiving as the indulgent fantasy was warm and inviting; fire and ice under his skin that flared whenever he was close enough to touch.

“Or we could...” Connor cleared his throat. “You know, drive around and find somewhere to park. Wherever. Just… anything, if it means getting another week with you.” 

Fire. Ice. A heartbeat in his throat. A voice that tried to drown it all out. 

And a single spark of rebellion that hadn’t been extinguished yet. 

“Okay,” Kevin said. “I’m in.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter felt like a bit of a rollercoaster to write, so hopefully it made for a decent read. I'm really excited about the next couple of chapters, so... stay tuned. As always, please feel free to comment and let me know what you're thinking!


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Deep breaths, everyone. This is a long one. But maybe my own personal favorite? 
> 
> I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing.

The loopy handwriting had started to smudge and fade from all the days the note spent folded up in Kevin’s pocket, but it was clear enough that he could still make out Connor’s distinct penmanship as he smoothed it out between his fingers. He was laying on his side, facing the wall without the usual accompaniment of dread that he had come to associate with this part of his day — the waiting, the anticipation, the not knowing… that was sometimes the worst part. But today was Friday, which meant there was an entirely different kind of anticipation that settled in his bones as he awaited the call, and it wasn’t a feeling he hated. 

His thumb brushed over the signature Connor had scrawled under his cheeky note, tracing the curved line of the pen stroke as if he could feel the pale, slender fingers wrapped around his own. _Your friend, Connor,_ it read, just above the phone number that Kevin had come to memorize after so many days of staring at the tiny square of paper. The sun was starting to set behind the clouds outside the tiny window above his bed, which meant there was only a few more hours until he could see him again.

It was getting harder to drag himself through the intervals between their sacred Fridays, time crawling slower with each progressing week. What had started out as a means of survival had become something more than that, though Kevin couldn’t quite pinpoint where, exactly, things had started to shift. He no longer viewed their nights together as a mere reprieve from the horror of the rest, though they were certainly still that. Now, he genuinely felt himself growing eager to see Connor for _Connor,_ and not for the relief he could offer him. As the days trickled on toward the weekend, he found himself zoning out, wondering to himself which pajamas Connor would wear that night, which book he would bring to enthusiastically pitch to Kevin as the next on his Must Read list, his face lighting up as he spoke in the higher-pitched tone he got when he was really excited about something. 

More than once, he found himself longing for Connor’s weight beside him on the bed, a feeling he hadn’t been able to get out of his brain since the first time it happened. 

He wasn’t sure what to make of these developments. It was easy, _too_ easy, to let his mind run away with these ideas of Connor, and of Connor with _him_ specifically, as something else, something _more_ than what they were on the surface. It didn’t help thinking about the plans that awaited them this particular evening, plans that deviated from their usual routine in favor of something that looked, sounded, and felt suspiciously closer to _date_ territory. But after everything Kevin had learned, he no longer had the luxury of being naive. He knew he would be wise to put a stop to these feelings before they could snowball out of his control. 

Too bad he was long past the point of no return. 

The sound of metal against wood startled Kevin from his thoughts. He scrambled to shove the note back into his pocket, no time to properly fold it into the neat, tiny square, and turned over in time to see James slipping in through the door.

“It’s just me,” he announced right away, keeping his voice low. Kevin relaxed. 

The lock on their door was a bit faulty, easy enough to manipulate with enough practice, but nobody in the house ever bothered fixing it while it was just James and Kevin occupying the space, as it had been for at least several months now. They never gave them reason to, always cautious on the rare opportunity they took to sneak down to the kitchen for a glass of water or something to eat. They had never been called out on it or caught, but Kevin suspected no one was really looking that deeply into it. Everyone who came and went from that house, the General most of all, knew the physical lock was not the one keeping them there anyway.

“There’s a new boy downstairs.” James’s face was grim as he clicked the door quietly shut behind him. “I wanted to bring him some water while I knew General Dickface was out.”

Kevin breathed out a heavy sigh through his nose, pushing himself into a sitting position. A helpless uneasiness settled in the pit of his stomach at the announcement. “What’s his name?” he asked.

“Chris.”

Kevin chewed the inside of his lip. “Do you think this one will make it upstairs?” 

It felt wrong on several levels to talk about them in such a detached way, the boys who came and went through the house. James and Kevin had both been in their position once. Some ended up staying for months at a time. Some, they only saw in glimpses before they were moved elsewhere or worse, and some, they only knew of their existence by the sounds of their muffled screams from below the kitchen until one day, they eventually stopped. 

“I don’t know. He’s feisty.” The hint of a smile on James’s face was weighed down by the sadness laced through it. Both of them knew that ‘feisty’ wasn’t exactly a quality that gave the kid the biggest chance at survival in his position. Still, there was a silent, mutual respect for his ability to still be fighting back after all that had undoubtedly happened to him, and perhaps a darker acknowledgment that wherever fighting landed him might be better than the fate he would be subjected to once he gave in. 

If anyone could speak to that, it was them.

“Were you at least careful?” Kevin asked. 

“Always.” James shrugged, stretching up onto his toes with his arms above his head, exposing a little sliver of pale belly before flopping down onto his mattress. “Haven’t been caught yet, have I? His bitch boy assistant was passed out on the couch the whole time. Didn’t notice a thing.”

Kevin thought of Marcus, the man who would eventually drive them each to their respective locations tonight as he did every other night, dozing just below. He was usually nothing more than a stoic presence at the house when the General was out or in the car with them, silent and brooding and entirely apathetic to the suffering that happened under his nose. He didn’t exactly go out of his way to antagonize them, but that was hardly enough to redeem him in Kevin’s eyes.

“Catch,” was all the warning Kevin got before James tossed something toward him. He caught it one-handed, flipping it over to see it was a sleeve of peanut butter crackers. His mouth watered at the sight. “I managed to sneak a pack while I was down there. Take a few, I’ll eat whatever you don’t want.”

It would have been so easy to follow those instructions, to tear open the packaging and quell the growing gnaw of hunger that had been building in his empty stomach since yesterday afternoon, but guilt stopped him. James had only snuck the one pack, hardly enough to ward off the hunger for either of them alone, and still he had shared with Kevin first. What he didn’t know was that tonight Kevin would be having a full meal, one that he didn’t have to plead or bargain for. 

He wasn’t sure why, exactly, he hadn’t told James about Connor and the hidden-away luxury of his Friday nights. Perhaps part of it was out of some misplaced guilt that he was getting this one, good thing while James got nothing, meanwhile continuing to share everything as small as a sleeve of crackers with Kevin. It wasn’t as if he could do much to share the reprieve he got from Connor. But more so, he was strangely compelled to protect their shared secret, like shielding a fragile little flame from the winds that threatened to blow it out. 

“Nah, you take ‘em. They’re yours.” He tossed the crackers back across the room, and James caught them, propping up on his elbow to look at him.

“Since when do I not share the goods with you?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “I thought I was the Robinhood of this operation.”

Kevin shrugged, not looking directly at him. “You’re the one who risked getting them. You deserve them.”

“Kevin.” His face turned serious. “You have another overnight. You probably need it more than I do. When’s the last time you ate?”

“Last night,” Kevin lied. “The guy bought me a bag of chips.”

“Dude...”

“Please,” Kevin insisted. “You eat them.”

James studied him, unconvinced but clearly seeing he wasn’t backing down. Eventually, he sighed, laying back down as he tore open the wrapper. 

“Fine,” James said. “But you’re having at least one. No arguments.”

When a single cracker landed on his lap, Kevin didn’t object.

* * *

Was this a bad idea? It was starting to feel like a bad idea. 

Kevin was a few minutes late, and it was probably mostly in Connor’s imagination, but he was starting to think that the front desk staff were getting suspicious of him. He’d strutted in a few minutes before nine, as planned, with all the false confidence of someone who had actually booked a room there. The original plan was to walk past the desk without acknowledgement, but halfway through the execution, his Midwestern-bred manners kicked in and he shot the girl a panicked smile that _definitely_ looked completely natural and not at all guilty. Or constipated. Fortunately, the bored-looking young woman at the counter didn’t appear to give a single shit where Connor was going, as long as he wasn’t doing anything to make her job harder. 

He had been standing in their previously agreed upon spot, in the first floor vending room, for a solid fifteen minutes, leaning up against the ice machine, the steady mechanical hum sending vibrations through his back. Connor’s lifetime record of compliance and general rule-following was really showing in the way his fingers tapped anxiously along the side of his phone where he gripped it tightly in front of him. The concept of sneaking around was not something he was terribly accustomed to. For that matter, neither was hiring prostitutes on the regular, but here he was. 

The thought was accompanied by an immediate lighting bolt of guilt, reminding him not to think about Kevin in those terms. Not that there was anything wrong with sex work when it was entirely consensual, but it felt wrong to categorize what was being done to Kevin under the same title. The two of them did a lot of dancing around the subject, a lot of avoiding the elephant in the room, probably more than they should, but Connor would have wagered that Kevin agreed with him on that much. 

Connor was anxious by nature, but it was only exacerbated by this particular set of circumstances, including the fact that he had no way of contacting Kevin to see what was going on. He had given him his phone number the previous week as a real shot in the dark, knowing full well he didn’t exactly have the resources available to make any use of it. If he had a cell phone, Connor probably would have sent him a minimum of seven worried text messages by now, asking where he was and if everything was okay. Absently, he wondered how he would have fared had he been born in a generation before communication existed at the tips of his fingers at all times.

He didn’t have much time to ponder the answer, because the sound of light footsteps coming down the hall had him tensing up, part of him suspecting that it was probably the hotel manager who had been watching him hover in the snack room for fifteen full minutes on the security cameras like a freak. But relief melted over him when a familiar mop of brown hair rounded the corner, peeking through the rectangular panel of glass in the door with a shy wave. Connor pushed off of the ice machine and crossed the tiny room in three steps. He flung the door open and, before he could stop himself, pulled Kevin into a hug.

There was a half second of hesitation, maybe less, before Kevin was returning the gesture, bringing both hands up to Connor’s back. “Hey,” he greeted, the vibration of his throat against Connor’s shoulder. 

“Hey, you.” He pulled back almost as soon as he initiated the embrace, taking a step back to grant Kevin some space. “It’s good to see you.”

“You too.” Kevin smiled. “I hope you weren’t waiting long.”

“Not at all,” Connor lied, then immediately realized he didn’t want to lie to Kevin. “Well, fifteen minutes. Not that I was counting. I mean— it’s fine. I was just…” he swallowed, gesturing around at the closet-like room, wondering why he couldn’t shut the hell up. “Um. Hanging out.”

Kevin raised an eyebrow, concealing the tiniest of smiles that made Connor’s cheeks warm under his gaze. “Are you alright?” he asked. “You seem… nervous.”

“Nervous? Nah.” Again, with the honesty thing. “Okay, maybe a little. It just feels like we’re sneaking around, you know?”

“We are.”

Connor bubbled out a nervous laugh at his deadpan rebuttal. “Yeah, well. I guess we tracked down the source of those nerves, then.”

“You’re okay, though, you know that, right?” Kevin asked, his face suddenly serious as he stepped into the vending room, letting the door click shut behind him. Connor took a breath at the realization of their sudden close proximity. “I mean… I wouldn’t have agreed to this if I thought it put you in any danger. If anyone was going to get in trouble here, it would be me.”

He was sure Kevin hadn’t intended it the way it came out, but Connor winced at his words. 

“You say that as if it’s a better alternative.” Connor’s voice was quiet, careful. 

Kevin looked away from the sudden intensity, the unspoken response written all over him without having to say a word: that was, in fact, _exactly_ how he saw it. Connor hadn’t the slightest clue how to go about dismantling _that_ troubling but unsurprising school of thought, so instead, he cleared his throat, opting instead to change the subject.

“So, um. Do you have any requests for tonight’s agenda?” Connor asked, shoving his hands into his pockets. “I’m open to anything.” 

Kevin shrugged, leaning against the opposite wall. Connor didn’t miss the way his eyes fell sidelong to the glass front of the vending machine, making a mental note to bump _dinner_ to the top of their priority list.

“Whatever you want,” he said. “You probably know the city better than I do. The bulk of my, ah… tourism has been limited to indoor spaces.”

It was probably better for both of them that Connor chose to skim past the utterly devastating implications behind that sentence.

“Well.” He rolled his shoulders back, trying to force out some of the tension there. “Pressure’s on. As your official tour guide, it looks like I’ve got some making up to do.”

The smile that melted effortlessly into Kevin’s features was one of the genuine ones it had taken Connor weeks to see for the first time, and hadn’t failed to warm his insides every time since. It was almost enough to make him forget about whatever potential danger lurked at the edges of what they were doing.

“Can’t wait.”

* * *

The cold wind bit at their noses as they approached the corner of Grant Park, but the inclement weather did little to deter the Friday night crowds. Native Chicagoans and tourists alike were bundled up in heavy winter coats and hats, gloved hands intertwined and swinging between couples as they strolled along the walkways in between the snow-covered grass. 

Kevin’s belly was full from the turkey sandwich and hot chocolate Connor had bought for him at one of the cafes along Michigan Avenue. He had recognized the shop from the time a nice barista had let him come inside to get warm while she opened up in the wee hours of the morning. That had probably been months ago. He had been staying with a wealthy overnight client, one of the traveling businessmen who could afford luxury hotel rooms along the main drag that overlooked the lake. He had kicked Kevin out early to catch a flight. With several hours left until Marcus was set to pick him up, and a disapproving glare from the hotel manager when he tried to tuck quietly away into one of the lobby chairs, he would have been stranded out in the cold had the kind stranger not let him in. She had given him a plain black coffee while he waited and didn’t ask any questions about what he was doing out on the streets before sunrise with no coat on. 

He elected not to share that particular story with Connor. 

They had been walking around for the better part of an hour, stopping every now and again so Connor could point out some touristy landmarks, as promised. Connor’s favorite was the giant bean — the _Cloud Gate_ sculpture, he had corrected himself — that sat at the front of Millennium Park; a massive chrome structure surrounded by tourists taking photos in the reflective surface. Connor had insisted that the coolest part was directly underneath the arc, where you could look up and see the world through a kaleidoscope reflection. Kevin had followed along, of course, but he spent less time looking at the sculpture and more time admiring Connor’s exposed neck as it extended up and back, his head tilted to gaze at the ceiling, a wide smile dimpling his wind-blown cheeks. 

The evening lacked the familiar routine of a hot shower and borrowed pajamas that he had become accustomed to, but Connor had still thought to bring his signature maroon hoodie, which was a comforting weight against Kevin’s skin and an extra layer of protection against the frigid temperatures. He had brought him an extra coat and a knit hat too, which he was immensely grateful for as they walked along the sidewalk, hands shoved deep in their pockets.

It was strange, being out in the world with Connor. Out here, in the eyes of pedestrian passersby and strangers on park benches, they could have been anything. There was no outward indication to give away that Connor was buying his time, or that Kevin was there on the direction of someone else who dictated his every move. He spared the briefest thought to what it might feel like to reach out and hold Connor’s hand as they walked, side by side, blending seamlessly into the crowd of happy couples that surrounded them without a second glance in their direction. The idea of the illusion was intoxicating, sending a tiny thrill through his body; the realization that he could pretend, just for tonight, to be someone else. 

He wondered what Connor would think of that. 

When they turned the corner at the end of the sidewalk, a large, white tent with color-changing lights and holiday music from inside spilling out across the lawn caught their attention. Small droves of people passed through the opening in the side, the closest of which he could make out was a teenage girl laughing into her boyfriend’s side, two pairs of matching ice skates dangling from the laces at their sides. 

Kevin’s heart thudded painfully in his chest at the subsequent montage of Saturdays that flashed behind his eyes, early mornings spent with Kayla and his mother and father in the stands of Jack’s ice hockey games. Holding his baby sister’s hands as they ventured out onto the ice for free-skate afterward, his mother’s voice shouting from behind the glass, _please be careful, Kevin, keep a hand on your sister. Don’t let her get hurt._

 _I won’t, mom. I won’t._

“Oh, wow. It’s free this year.” Connor pulled him out of his monetary trance, pointing out a sign just outside the tent entrance. Kevin blinked, pulling in a long breath of cold air into his lungs to bring him back to the present. 

“Should we do it?” He asked. 

Connor’s eyebrows raised, crinkling up his forehead beneath the curls of hair that stuck out from under his winter hat. “Does something about me give off a general air of athleticism? Because I’m afraid you’ve deeply misread the situation.”

“You can’t ice skate?” Kevin asked.

He grimaced in the direction of the white tent. “Can’t say I’ve ever had the pleasure of trying.”

“I could teach you.” Kevin suppressed the rising flutter in his stomach at the mental image of Connor clinging to his arm to stay upright on the ice, his long, pale fingers wrapping around his bicep, his shoulder warm and pressed against his. He definitely didn’t let himself think about any of that.

Connor snorted. “You mean you could watch me fall on my ass all night.”

“Both could be fun.” Kevin shrugged.

And that was how, several minutes and several more botched attempts at standing upright on solid ground later, Kevin found himself standing at the edge of the rink, his hand outstretched in invitation to Connor, who clung to the wall for dear life.

“I already regret this.” Connor’s teeth chattered as he took his first step onto the ice, ankles wobbling unsteadily despite how tightly he had fastened his rental skates. 

“Look, you’re doing great. One foot on the ice and haven’t even fallen yet,” Kevin quipped.

 _“Yet?”_ His head snapped up to Kevin so fast that he almost immediately lost his balance, swinging his free arm out to clutch onto the wall before he could slip. Kevin barely concealed a laugh. 

“You’re going to be fine,” Kevin assured him. “Everybody falls at least once their first time.”

“How are you such a pro at this?” Connor kept his eyes glued to his feet as they shuffled forward, keeping to the outer edge so that Connor could have one hand on the wall. 

“I’m not,” Kevin said, the muscle memory of his movements on the ice sinking back into him effortlessly as he glided forward. “I just did it for fun growing up. My little brother played hockey, so we spent a lot of time on the ice. Your options for recreation are limited as a Mormon kid in Carmel, Indiana.”

Connor looked up from his own feet to glance at Kevin. “You’re from Indi—?” His question was cut off as his foot slipped out from under him. His right hand scrambled for purchase against the wall, but it was Kevin who kept him upright as he swooped in from his left, catching him by the arm. 

“Easy,” Kevin breathed, hyper-aware of every inch of Connor under his palms, warm, wiry muscles straining beneath his coat as he fought to keep his grip. 

There was the slightest tremor in his chuckle as he righted himself, his cheeks burning to a brilliant pink from more than the windchill. “This is the ultimate nightmare of the awkward and lanky,” he said, masking his embarrassment with an unconvincing grumble. But when Kevin tried to pull away, Connor doubled down on his grip, latching onto Kevin’s side. Their eyes met, and a tiny smirk broke through Connor’s hard expression. “If I go down, you’re coming with me.”

Kevin felt his heart stutter in his chest as Connor readjusted his grip, thin fingers soft and strong on his arm, and decided he could live with those consequences. 

Making their way around the ice felt like… well, at the risk of sounding dramatic, it felt like heaven. The wind against his face, soft tendrils of his hair that stuck out from under his borrowed hat ticking against his skin, the movement of his body unrestricted and so very _his own._ It was the closest thing to freedom Kevin had felt in a very long time, and maybe the most he would feel ever again. He couldn’t help but think of the boy who had been kept in a basement a year ago, frightened and starving and sure that he had seen his last sliver of daylight on the other side of the concrete walls that held him in. Part of him, in a much more metaphorical sense, still believed his days in the sun were behind him. 

But this, now, here with Connor in their shared illusion of normalcy, felt like he had been touched by a single ray, streaming through a window upon which Connor McKinley had thrown open the curtains. If the rest of his life — however long it may be — was to be sheathed in shadow, he would make the most of these rare moments of light. Like a dog curled up and dozing in a pool of sunlight on the carpet, he would soak up every bit of warmth he could get at Connor’s side.

They managed to make it almost a full lap before Connor hit the ice for the first time, which was honestly impressive given his apparent lack of coordination. He did break his threat to drag Kevin down with him, however, opting to release his arm as he fell. Kevin was crouched by his side immediately, but Connor was already laughing by the time he got down to him.

“Are you alright?” Kevin asked. 

“More a matter of ego at this point.” Connor’s hand rubbed at the hip that had taken the brunt of the fall. “I think that six-year-old who’s been trailing us just lapped us again.”

Kevin smiled. “We’ll get her next time.” 

He offered out a hand as he stood to his full height again, and Connor took it, trying to leverage himself off the ground. He ground the blade of right foot at an angle into the ice, gaining traction, but when the left one slid out in front of him, he slipped and thumped his back against the ice, this time making good on his promise and pulling Kevin down on top of him. 

Kevin caught himself just before his full weight could land, hovering above Connor’s flattened body with two palms on either side of his shoulders. They were close enough that he could feel his strained puffs of breath on his chin, warm with the scent of peppermint hot chocolate and the strawberry chapstick he kept in the cupholder of his car. It occurred to Kevin, in this most inappropriate of times and places, that he would love nothing more than to know that taste on his own lips.

“Sorry.” Connor shook him from his wayward thoughts, pulling his eyes up from his mouth. If the sudden blush on Connor’s cheeks was from the embarrassment of falling or something else entirely, he would never know. “To be fair, I warned you I would suck at this.”

Kevin pushed himself off him with all the grace he could manage, sliding onto his knees beside him. 

“You don’t suck,” he argued, and then, after a pointed glare, “Okay, so we can’t all be masters of calculus and ice skating.”

“God, don’t bring calculus into this, too. Haven’t I been hurt enough?” 

“Come on.” Kevin laughed. “Let’s get you off the ice before you lose a finger.”

They were halfway to a crouch when two pairs of skates skidded to a stop directly in front of them, tossing a spray of ice in their direction. 

“Connor?” a deep voice called from above them.

They looked up at the same time, and from beside him Kevin heard a sharp intake of breath. “Eric,” Connor said, his voice pinched off to a higher tone than it was just a moment ago. “What- what are you doing here?”

The tall man who stood over them — _Eric_ — had shaggy hair and an expensive-looking beige sweater peeking out from the neck of his peacoat. His hand was locked around that of a shorter brunette woman who appeared to be wholly disinterested in the exchange. 

“I promised Bex we would come to the city this weekend.” His words were casual, but Kevin didn’t miss the way his eyes drew directly to him as he spoke, narrowing as if trying to place him. 

But Kevin didn’t need reminding. 

The last time he had looked into those eyes, Kevin had been naked and kneeling on cheap hotel carpet, avoiding the same leering gaze that lingered on him now. Unconsciously, he shifted so that he was positioned slightly behind Connor. 

“What are _you_ doing here?” Eric countered, his eyes finally leaving Kevin to meet Connor’s.

Did he not recognize him? Kevin supposed their interaction had only lasted a few minutes, during most of which his gaze had been fixated on places that were decidedly _not_ Kevin’s face. And he had been drunk, for certain. Kevin remembered the smell of beer on his breath as he appraised him, taking a step closer when his friend — Connor’s other friend — left the room. He hadn’t touched him, but in the moment Kevin had been certain the single-client arrangement he had prepared for was about to turn into something much worse. 

Both Kevin and Connor seemed to be having the same telepathic dilemma, trying to read Eric for any clues of whether or not he remembered the hired prostitute Connor was ice skating with, knowing the rest of the conversation would have to play out very differently depending on that answer. 

Connor swallowed so hard Kevin could hear it from beside him, going out on a limb with a hesitant smile in his voice. “Falling, mostly,” he said. 

Eric chuckled. Or, more accurately, huffed a single unamused breath from his nose. “Didn’t think you were much of an ice skater.”

“Well.” Connor rubbed his palms against his ice-dampened jeans. “Now we know why.”

His eyes shifted back to Kevin, who looked promptly down to the ice. “Who’s your friend?”

Kevin heard the long exhale from Connor, saw some of the tension slip out of his posture at the confirmation of Eric's ignorance, but Kevin wasn’t quite sold. “Oh,” Connor said. “This is my, um. My tutor. Kevin.”

He tried to conceal his wince at the use of his real name (or was it also the reduction of his title to something as surface level as ‘tutor?’), certain that Connor hadn’t meant any harm. Still, it put him on edge. 

Eric raised an eyebrow. “Your tutor?”

“Yeah. For calculus.”

“You know the semester’s over, right?”

Connor opened his mouth, then closed it. “Right. He, sorry he _was_ my tutor. We’re just friends now.”

Even without looking up from the scuffed ice, Kevin could feel Eric’s eyes travel back to him again. “Friends, huh?”

“Yes.” An edge of hardness pushed its way into Connor’s tone. “Just friends.”

“Right.” Only when Kevin felt him turn away did he look up, watching Eric reclaim the grip on his date’s hand, nearly enveloping it completely in the size of his own. “Well, we have dinner reservations we should get to.” He paused, looking between them. “I don’t suppose you and your _friend_ would like to join us?”

“We already ate,” Connor answered nearly automatically, making Kevin’s chest deflate with relief. “Thanks, though.”

Eric offered a single nod in return. “Sure. See you next weekend, then? Your family is coming to the Christmas thing, right?”

“Yeah. Of course. See you then.”

“Try to stay vertical, yeah?” Eric called over his shoulder, already skating away. 

“Asshole,” Connor whispered, quiet enough for just Kevin to hear, but Kevin was caught in the gaze that Eric threw back at him as he and his date approached the edge of the rink. “Kevin?”

He snapped his attention back to Connor. “Yeah.”

“You okay?”

Kevin swallowed. Nodded. “Yeah. Are you?”

Connor ran a hand through his hair, letting out a long breath. “That was weird,” he said. “That was _weird,_ right?”

A young skater who looked to be about Kevin’s sister’s age skidded past them, nearly colliding with them as they obstructed her path. Kevin wrapped a hand around Connor’s elbow, guiding him toward the wall and out of the flow of traffic. He cleared his throat. “We should, uh. We should probably get out of here, yeah?”

Connor’s eyes lingered somewhere just over Kevin’s shoulder before he nodded his agreement. “Yeah. Let’s get out of here.”

He managed to escort Connor to the exit without any more falls, though not without a few close calls. They were silent as they changed out of their skates and back into their shoes, side by side on the bench outside the rink. Surely they were both analyzing the encounter they had just shared, neither quite sure what to make of it. 

A flash of movement in the corner of his eye caught Kevin’s attention as they gathered their things to leave, the flaps on the side of the tent blowing back as a couple made their way through the exit. Kevin looked over just in time to catch a glimpse of the stare Eric was throwing him before he disappeared to the other side.

* * *

It was long past midnight.

The car was parked along a narrow path where Connor had pulled partway into the grass, long, willowy branches above them swooping down to brush the windshield. They were far enough off the main drag that the traffic of Lake Shore Drive was reduced to a muffled hum in the background, the occasional stream of headlights glittering in through the mess of trees near the road. To their right, separated only by several yards of grass and an empty, wooden bench, was the lake, reflecting moonlight between patches of solid ice.

Promontory Point, Connor had called it. A little piece of Burnham Park that jutted out into the lake and was apparently one of Connor’s favorite places to come for some quiet when he was in the city. 

The only light inside the car came from the pale glow of an old streetlamp several paces ahead, casting soft shadows over their faces. Classic Christmas music, like the kind on the record his grandmother used to play at Christmas Eve dinner, filled the car from the old, tinny speakers of Connor’s car. Neither one of them had done much talking on the drive, but Kevin could feel the tension rising off of Connor like heat off the logs in a freshly extinguished fire pit.

He wanted to ask what was wrong, though he was fairly certain it had something to do with the strangely tense interaction at the ice rink. So much of Kevin’s safety the last year had depended greatly on his ability to read the mood in a room and temper his responses accordingly. Logically, he knew Connor was safe and would never hurt him, and would probably be wounded if he knew that Kevin still felt the familiar fear creeping up in him as he twisted his hands in his lap. Still, he wished he knew what he was thinking.

Finally, Connor broke through the silence without prompting, his voice soft and hesitant.

“I never did ask… what happened when you were alone with them?” Connor asked, turning the radio down to a light hum in the background. Kevin looked up at him, eyebrows drawn. “Steve and Eric,” he elaborated. “I know you met them the night they, um... the night of my birthday.”

Ah. Kevin nodded. “Briefly. Yeah.”

“Were they… nice to you?” Connor asked hesitantly. 

“They were fine,” Kevin answered. It seemed like the simpler response he was probably looking for, leaving out the memory of crude laughter and lingering eyes. “It was really only a few minutes before they sent you in.”

Connor nodded. “Right. I guess that’s probably why he didn’t recognize you tonight.” He seemed to hesitate for a moment, offering a small smile. “That was a good thing, right? Saved ourselves a bit of a strange explanation.”

Kevin knew he meant no harm, and the statement was undeniably fact, still he couldn’t ward off the irrational flash of hurt at the notion that Connor wanted to hide him from his friends. He didn’t bother mentioning that Eric had most definitely not been quite as oblivious as he let on, because he had a feeling Connor sensed it, too. “Right,” he agreed instead.

Connor went quiet again, his hands twisting nervously around the lower part of his steering wheel. He snuck a quick glance at Kevin, a subtle heat lighting up the tips of his ears. “I’m sorry about the whole… you know. What they made you do.” He looked down at his hands. “When they made you, um… undress. For me.”

“Oh,” Kevin said, then he looked away, too.

“Sorry,” he said quickly. “We just. We never spoke about it, so.”

“It wasn’t your fault.” Kevin saved him after a beat of silence. Connor frowned. 

“I know,” he said. “But I was so busy being mortified for myself about the whole evening in the moment that I hardly took the time to consider how it must have been for you. And I’m sorry for that. For all of it.” He paused, grimacing. “And, god. For being so awkward and embarrassed about all of it. I’m sure that wasn’t helpful either.”

“Not the hooker-hiring type, huh?” Kevin had meant it mostly as a joke, and certainly not in an accusatory way, but Connor seemed to take it that way, turning to him quickly, eyebrows raised.

“No!” He assured him. “No, that’s… I don’t… No. It’s not that I have anything against it, you know, when it’s safe and consensual and…” He stopped to expel a long breath, shaking his head like he was clearing an Etch-A-Sketch of some messy picture he had drawn by accident. “It’s a me thing. I’m… I’ve never, um. Done it. Anything, I mean. All of it. I’m...”

“I know.”

Connor’s head snapped up, a look of comical horror widening his eyes. 

Kevin bit his lip to hide a smile. “They told me. When they set me up with you.”

“God, of course they did.” Connor’s head fell dramatically onto his steering wheel, buried in his arms. “Of course they found a way to make the whole thing even more fucking humiliating.”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, you know,” Kevin offered.

“Being a v—? I can’t even say it.” Connor sat back in his seat. “God. I’m twenty-one years old and I can’t even say it out loud.”

“You were also raised Mormon,” Kevin pointed out. “And even if you weren’t… so what? It would be okay even if you _never_ wanted to have sex.”

“I do!” Connor answered so fast it made Kevin jump, then caught himself, reigning it in as he lowered his hands back to his lap. “I mean, um. You know, eventually. With the right person or… whatever. Ugh. That sounds cheesy.”

“It’s not cheesy.”

Connor snorted, still looking away with a fierce blush in his cheeks. “Right,” he said. “And how old were _you_ when…” His brain seemed to catch up to his mouth just a moment too late, his eyes widening in apology as he skidded to a halt. “Oh, god. Oh god, I’m sorry I… I shouldn’t have asked that, that was stupid of me. You don’t have to answer that.”

Kevin controlled any knee jerk reactions with a careful swallow, not wanting to make Connor feel any guiltier. He looked down at his own lap. “It’s okay,” he said, and he genuinely meant it. The particular event his question brought to mind felt like nearly a lifetime ago. And he had… well, not so much _processed_ it as he had buried it beneath the weight of so many other experiences that he could hardly feel its sting any longer. “It wasn’t… it wasn’t like you think.” He paused, wincing slightly. “Not exactly.”

Connor was quiet, watching him from the driver's seat with a careful expression. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

Did he? It only then occurred to him that he had never actually told anyone. When it happened, there had been no one really to tell, cut off entirely at that point from everyone he knew back in Indiana. And in the time that followed, he had mostly tried not to think about it anymore. 

Connor was the closest thing he had to a friend. No— he _was_ his friend. He had told him as much, and if he was going to tell anyone, if he trusted anyone to share the weight of something like that, it would have been Connor. He realized then, there was a lot he would have liked to tell him. So much story he wanted to tell and had never gotten the chance. Maybe… maybe it would even feel good. 

“His name was Dominic Neeley,” Kevin said, his words barely a whisper in the thin air of the car. “I think it was, anyway. That’s what he told me, but he, ah… he told me a lot of things that weren’t true.”

He could feel Connor watching him carefully from the driver’s side, boring through him with all the compassion he knew he would find if he were to look over at him, but Kevin kept his eyes straight forward, his chin down. 

“We met outside of a concert,” he continued. “Well, kind of. _He_ was at a concert, taking a smoke break in the same alley that I just so happened to be getting mugged in at the time.” He sort of chuckled. Connor did not. Kevin frowned. “Sorry, it’s not funny.”

“It’s okay,” Connor said quietly, prompting him on. Kevin took a breath. 

“I’d kind of been on the streets for a couple nights.” He somehow had it in him, even after all this time, to cringe at the admission of his own destitution. “The money I’d brought from home when I ran away depleted sooner than I anticipated. Turns out highly sheltered eighteen-year-olds are not the best with financial management.”

Once again, Connor didn’t laugh at his joke, but he did offer him a weak smile when Kevin dared to peek over. 

“Indiana,” Connor said softly. “You were saying earlier that’s where you’re from.”

Kevin nodded. “I, um. I managed to score a few nights at shelters in the city after I ran out of hostel money. But there was this one night, at the last one I stayed at… Some guy, some older guy, tried to mess with me in the bathroom when nobody was around.” He paused, looking up at the sharp intake of breath across from him. “He didn’t really do anything,” he assured Connor, though the worry lines in his forehead only creased further. “I pushed him off before he got very far, but… when he fell, he hit his head on the sink and got a pretty nasty wound.”

“Good,” Connor practically growled, his voice a little broken and not much higher than a whisper. Kevin let out a humorless laugh.

“Yeah, well. Not for me,” he said. “They must have felt like it was a real good day to stick to their ‘zero-tolerance’ violence policy, because they kicked me out for ‘fighting.’ And since there were no cameras in the bathrooms…” Kevin shrugged, feeling only a stray ash of the bitterness that had once burned heavy in his chest at the thought of the injustice he’d been dealt. “Anyway, that was how I ended up in the alley where Dominic found me.”

He could tell Connor wanted to say something. Perhaps he was experiencing a fraction of the anger that Kevin had felt about it once, but Kevin couldn’t afford to go down that path again, so he pushed forward. 

“He took me home, back to his apartment, and he cleaned me up. He asked me where I was going after, so I told him about my situation. He told me I could stay with him. For a while. A few weeks.”

Those weeks had felt like a lifetime in his memory. They had felt so _real,_ at the time, so full of vibrancy and light that nothing could ever touch them. Like it was a whole era of his life that represented freedom and danger that only reached the limits of what was fun until the night it had blown far past it. 

The sudden burn of tears caught Kevin off guard, and he couldn’t react fast enough to puncture the sob that bubbled out of his throat. Connor waited patiently, quietly. Out of the corner of his eye, Kevin thought maybe he saw his hand twitched outward toward the center console between them. 

“I thought I was in love,” Kevin sniffed, swiping at his tears with the back of his sleeves. “Do you know how stupid I feel now for saying that?”

Connor swallowed, but it did little to keep the roughness out of his own voice. “You’re not stupid, Kevin.”

“I thought he cared about me.” He shook his head, pulling in a deep breath through his nose to quell the spiraling emotions before they could suffocate him. “He made me think he did, but the whole time he was just… collecting information about me, so they could use it against me later. Making me trust him so I’d be easier to hand over.”

There was a faint creak of leather as Connor sat up in his seat, his eyes turning to burn through Kevin’s side once more. Something seemed to click in his mind. “Dominic is…?”

“The one who sold me out.” Kevin replied flatly. “Yeah.”

Connor collapsed slowly back, turning his own eyes toward the windshield as well. Kevin could hear rather than see him struggling for words, eventually settling for, “I’m so sorry.”

Kevin nodded once, unsure of how to respond himself, especially with the way his insides suddenly felt like they had been scooped out, his nerves scrubbed raw. He had never bared this part of his story to anyone, had never spoken the words out loud, even to himself. He hadn’t expected it to hurt so much, nor did he anticipate that once he kicked open the floodgates, that the words would want to pour out of him with the ferocity of a year’s worth of grief and rage that he had no hope of stopping.

“The night we had sex for the first time, my um, _my_ first time, we were…” Kevin pulled in a shaky breath, closing his eyes as the memory roared to life inside him. “We were already lying in his bed. Just talking, like we always did. I had just told him how I had never done anything before, and there was this moment… I didn’t even realize until I looked back on it much later, but he got this sad sort of look in his eyes when I told him that. That was right before he started kissing me. He told me…” Kevin swallowed. “He told me my first time should be with someone who cared about me.”

This time when Kevin broke, Connor didn’t hesitate to lay his open palm on the console in invitation. Kevin took it immediately, placing his hand over top so that their fingers could lace together. 

“Maybe he was just feeding me a line. I don’t know,” Kevin said. “But sometimes I think… maybe he did it so that my first experience wasn’t… you know. What he knew was coming.”

Connor didn’t bother concealing his own tears that streamed down his own face. “I’m so sorry this happened to you, Kevin. That it’s still happening to you.”

It wasn’t pity, but something much softer he detected in Connor’s voice, which Kevin was grateful for. Still, he didn’t know how to respond. No amount of _sorry_ could ever undo what’s already happened. He wished he could tell Dominic that instead of Connor. Instead, he blinked away the remnants of moisture in his lashes and scrubbed the heels of his palms over his eyes, clearing his throat. “Sorry,” he said thickly. “I didn’t mean for all of that to…” He trailed off, gesturing vaguely. “Sorry.”

“Hey.” Connor flipped their hands over, squeezing gently until Kevin looked up at him. “It’s okay. No, I mean it,” he stressed when Kevin tried to look away again. “I’m… I’m glad you told me. I want you to feel like you can trust me. As much as you can. I— I understand a little more now, after hearing your story, why that might be difficult for you.”

It was true, certainly, and probably a bit of an understatement, but he resented it anyway. He hated how Dominic, after all this time, could fuck him up so badly; bad enough to keep a wedge of distance between him and this person that every instinct in his body was drawn to. The battle in his head had been raging since the night they met, pushing and pulling him toward and away, like Connor was a magnetic light that he couldn’t help gravitate toward but feared the burn of coming too close.

But his light didn’t burn, it only warmed. It was brilliant without blinding him, bright enough to light the spaces inside of him that had been swallowed up in shadow. And Kevin was tired of fighting off the one good thing that had happened to him in a long time. 

“I do trust you,” Kevin said. “More than I thought possible.” He was looking straight at Connor when he spoke this time, and Connor was looking back at him, electricity pulsing in the small space between them. 

“I wish I could say I’m glad I met you, without all the things that had to happen to bring you here,” Connor said, carefully choosing his words. He swallowed. “But I am. Glad, I mean. As furious as I was with my friends that night, I can’t help but be glad they brought you into my life. I feel awful for saying it out loud, but it’s true.”

“Why do you feel awful?” Kevin asked.

“Because you weren’t there by choice.”

“You didn’t know that,” Kevin pointed out. “And you weren’t the one who made the call, anyway.”

“I’m the one making the calls now,” Connor said. “And I can’t help but realize that’s not entirely your choosing, either.”

Kevin shook his head. “I do choose this.”

“Yeah, but even if you didn’t...” Connor’s voice caught in his throat. It wasn’t often that either of them brought direct attention to the inevitable imbalance of power that existed between them for reasons that were neither of their faults. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m trying to say here. I should stop talking.”

“I would choose it regardless,” Kevin said softly, squeezing his hand. “If the choice was mine, it would be this. It would be you.”

He couldn’t explain the shift that happened then, or the buzz in the air that seemed to intensify from his words, and he really wasn’t sure if it was just in his imagination that their faces seemed to be closer than they were moments ago. But perhaps when he said he was tired of fighting the way he felt about Connor, he meant all of it. 

Kevin’s eyes were the first to twitch downward to Connor’s lips, remembering vividly the moment on the ice, the gravitational pull of strawberry and peppermint. He wondered if the taste still lingered, then suddenly it was the only thing his brain could latch onto: the knowledge that he was mere inches from finding out. Connor must have felt it, too, because he was leaning closer, his own eyes nearly crossing as he looked from his mouth to his eyes. The hand in his was suddenly clammier than it had been before, just the hint of a tremor running through his thin fingers. 

Connor licked his lips, a torn expression radiating in his eyes. “Kevin, I don’t want— you know I'm not—”

“This isn’t that,” he whispered, knowing exactly where he was headed and not wanting to go anywhere near it. Not now. Not with him. “You aren’t like the rest of them.”

They were close enough now that Kevin could feel the soft puff of breath against his own lips as Connor exhaled, closing his eyes briefly before meeting Kevin’s again. “I need to know you want this, too.”

“Then ask me.”

Connor swallowed so loud Kevin could hear it in the silence of the car, puncturing the sound of their heavy breathing. “Can I kiss you?”

The hand that wasn’t intertwined with his own raised to brush softly against his jawline when he nodded, and Kevin reciprocated the gesture, marvelling at the feeling of soft, freckled skin under his fingertips. Connor pushed forward, and the first graze of their lips was so subtle he almost thought he’d imagined it, as he had so many times before. But then Connor pressed forward a second time, this time with more confidence, capturing Kevin’s bottom lip between his, and any fantasy he might have held before was blown out of the water. 

Something inside him melted; the constant battle of fire and ice ceasing under the kiss, bowing to the flames that lit up every inch of his skin. It was so different from the first time Dominic kissed him, so very different from every kiss he had been given and forced to take in the last year, but it felt wrong to even compare them. This, _this,_ what was happening now, was in a class all its own. This kiss wasn’t born out of impulsivity or rebellion. It wasn’t passively accepted or begrudgingly reciprocated, and it wasn’t a prelude to anything more than what it was. There would be no expectation for him to climb into the backseat or to fold his body uncomfortably over the center console. It was just _this._

Just Connor. Just him. Just this moment between them in the quiet of the car, the soft notes of Christmas music and a glittering lake in the backdrop. 

Just the taste of strawberry chapstick. The hint of peppermint. And something that Kevin was quite sure he could label _love._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :)))))))))))))))))))))
> 
> To the small group of regular readers/commenters I've accumulated so far, I just wanted to give you a special thank you. You have no idea how much I look forward to each of your comments popping up in my inbox with each update. It means the world to me that there are people out there invested in this story I care about so much. Thank you, truly.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HAPPY NEW YEAR'S EVE. I didn't originally plan on posting this today, but I thought, hey, why not go out of this hell year with a bang.
> 
> I think now is a good time to reiterate to everyone who's reading: If you know me, you know this story will have a happy ending. It just will. Just, uh... trust the process and don't be mad at me AND JUST REMEMBER HOW HAPPY I LET EVERYONE BE AT THE END OF CHAPTER 8 OK
> 
> Please enjoy.
> 
> OH, AND AN ADDITIONAL WARNING, PLEASE HEED:
> 
> **vaguely mentioned suicidal ideations***

He was holding his hand. There was a half-hot mug of black coffee in front of him, a gaudy string of silver-and-green tinsel overhead, and their fingers were laced together on the tabletop between them. Connor’s thumb brushed over the side of his knuckle every few seconds as a reminder that he was here, that this was real. A light dusting of snow had begun to pick up just outside the window above their booth, thick clumps melting on impact as they collided with the glass. But in here, Kevin felt so warm.

The diner was two blocks away from their alias hotel, open twenty-four hours, so it served as the perfect place to dip into until the proverbial clock struck midnight and Kevin turned back into a pumpkin once again. The restaurant was simple and quaint in the best way, sporting a checkerboard floor and old-fashioned vinyl booths, old, soft Christmas music playing from what looked to be an actual, functioning jukebox in the corner. It was the type of vintage that wasn’t constructed to fit a trend, but was just genuinely just _old,_ evidenced by the cracks in the tiles and the outdated decor. It had been almost entirely empty when they stumbled in around four this morning, hungry and sleepy and floating on air, so they didn’t feel too bad about the prospect of loitering at a table for their last few hours together. 

They had spent the preceding hours in Connor’s car, just… kissing. 

Kissing, and nothing else, which was a distinction Kevin didn’t realize could mean so much to him until he experienced it tonight. There had been several times throughout when Kevin’s instincts twitched to life inside him, bracing him for a wandering hand up his thigh, a forceful push on the back of his neck, but none of it came. Not once had Connor validated any of his fears. Not once, in the intensity and the fire of all of it, had Connor pushed him any further than he wanted to go. Instead, he had pulled back every few minutes or so, whenever things started to get too intense, and he checked in with Kevin, asking if he was okay. If he was still into it. Reminding him that it was okay, at any point, if he wasn’t. 

It was terrifying and exhilarating, feeling the way he did for Connor, and feeling it so out in the open the way he was. But the fear didn’t hold a candle to the joy that had split open his chest, flooding his insides with a sense of warmth and safety he had forgotten how to feel. It was enough, almost, to let his mind slip into dangerous territory, to a place where he allowed himself to consider Connor’s standing offer. He thought about what it might be like if he were to risk getting help. The way he talked about it made it sound so... feasible. It was easy to follow the instinct to believe him when he said everything would be okay. 

But Kevin knew, logically, that Connor was coming at it from a much more idyllic perspective. He didn’t fault him for that. In fact, he was grateful for it, because his naivety meant that he didn’t know the things Kevin did. That he’d never had to learn how cruel and unfair the world could be the same way he had. Connor didn’t understand that the police weren’t always safe, that some of them lived in the back pockets of people with more reach than he could even fathom. One wrong move, one word to the wrong person, and that would be it. 

He didn’t want to think about that now. Not here.

For now, Kevin would just be grateful for the time he did have with Connor. Kevin knew it wouldn’t be forever. Eventually, Connor would get tired of jumping through all the hoops required to spend time with him, would become justifiably scared of the danger that Kevin dragged around with him, or maybe he would find someone else. Someone he could take home and spend more than one night with at a time and be with _for real._ But tonight, it was Kevin’s hand in Connor’s. It was the memory of his lips lingering on his, the messy evidence of fingers in his bronze curls. And he could happily live in this moment for the rest of his life.

“I don’t want you to go.” Connor was sipping on a strawberry milkshake, which Kevin had smirked at when he ordered, glad that he was no longer keeping up the charade of coffee-drinking after their drunken confession. A milkshake seemed to suit him better, anyway, and he couldn’t deny how adorable it was to watch little clumps of whipped cream stick to the tip of his nose.

Kevin turned their linked hands so that he could glance at Connor’s watch. “We still have another hour or so,” he said, though his own heart sank at how quickly the time had passed. 

“It’s not enough,” Connor spoke his exact thoughts out loud, squeezing his fingers lightly. “I’m going to miss you.”

The explosion of warmth behind his ribs could have been enough to melt all the snow in Chicago. “I’ll miss you, too,” Kevin whispered. 

A flash of decisiveness passed through Connor’s eyes before he lifted their joined hands to his mouth, pressing a long, soft kiss to Kevn’s knuckles. He felt himself melt a little bit as he watched Connor close his eyes tight, all the words he wanted to say and Kevin wished he could say right back flowing into the unspoken gesture. He released him after a long moment, clearing his throat and blinking back the hint of tears that Kevin pretended not to notice. 

“Six days isn’t so long, yeah?” he tried, his voice pinched with false optimism. Both of them knew the six days in question would feel like an eternity. They always did.

Kevin smiled anyway. “Friday will be here before we know it.”

Connor let out what appeared to be a cleansing breath, shaking his head in a way that made the loose curls over his forehead bounce with the movement. “Right,” he said. “Let’s not talk about that now. Not while we still have time left tonight.”

“This morning,” Kevin corrected, nudging his boot playfully under the table. Outside the window, the slightest stream of golden light was beginning to line the edges of the buildings nearby. 

“More coffee?” Their waitress appeared at the end of the table, already topping off Kevin’s mug with a fresh pot, steam rising from the top. 

“Thank you,” he murmured, wishing he had a few dollars he could leave her as an extra tip for all her patience this morning. 

As she stepped away, the chime of the bell hanging over the glass door pulled Kevin’s attention to the entryway, and his blood turned to cold slush in his veins.

Kevin’s eyes were glued to the man that had entered the diner alone, following him all the way to the counter, where he grabbed an empty stool at the furthest end. Connor was saying something, he thought, but the words might as well have been spoken from under water, every shred of Kevin’s attention zeroed in on the familiar black, leather jacket and hunched shoulders of his driver. 

He was frozen solid, paralyzed as he watched him murmur something to the waitress behind the bar. How could this be happening? How could life pile onto him so fucking cruelly? Why couldn’t he have just had this _one nice thing?_ Why had be been stupid enough to risk this in the first place when he knew, he _knew,_ he would always get caught?

“Kevin?” It wasn’t until Connor squeezed his hand that he was able to snap his focus back to him. “Are you okay?”

“I have to go,” he said immediately, surprised that any amount of his voice made it to the surface around the growing lump in his throat.

“Wha—? Go where? _Now?”_ Connor was confused, but Kevin didn’t have time, nor the clarity of mind, to explain. He had to get out of there. He had to _run._

“I have to get out of here,” he muttered, mostly to himself as he scrambled to remove himself from the booth as smoothly as possible, which was difficult when every muscle in his body was vibrating in terror. 

“Kevin, wait—” 

It happened in slow motion. Connor’s hand landed on his wrist, an instinctive motion he seemed to regret immediately and tried to pull back at the same time Kevin ripped himself free. The combined momentum sent Kevin crashing to the ground, taking the fresh mug of coffee at the edge of the table with him. He barely registered the shattering of ceramic against tile, barely felt the scalding hot spray that splattered across his lap, his hands, his face. The only thing he saw were the eyes that met his from across the diner, drawn in by the commotion. 

“No,” he whispered. 

Marcus’s expression darkened, the beam of his gaze pinning Kevin in place on the ground. He was frozen solid. He couldn’t even try to move as he watched Marcus push away from the counter, slapping down the newspaper in his fist, and make his way toward him. 

“Kevin?” Connor was at his side in an instant, kneeling in the puddle of spilled coffee. He didn’t have time to warn him before a large hand landed on his shoulder, pushing him out of the way. “Woah, what—?”

“Don’t make a scene,” Marcus growled as soon as he was within earshot, ignoring Connor completely. He gripped Kevin by the elbow, hard enough to bruise, and yanked him to his feet. 

Kevin didn’t dare resist, even as he slipped against the pool of liquid on the floor. He knew that beneath the left side of his leather jacket, hooked in the holster of his jeans and concealed from view, was the gun Marcus carried with him at all times. He was also well aware of the crowd of eyes that had trickled their way due to the spectacle of the whole scene, and he was not about to put the entire diner at risk by doing something as stupid as fighting back. 

He was still half-paralyzed by the time he was dragged through the exit, his sneakers fumbling over uneven pavement as he struggled to keep up. An apology, a plea, _something, anything_ was trapped in his throat, but he couldn’t make his mouth work. His heart was rabbit-fast in his chest as they approached the familiar black Lincoln in the parking lot, his knees buckling under him before Marcus yanked him forward again and he was forced to catch himself on unsteady legs and keep walking. 

The chime of the bell on the door rattled against glass from behind them, quick footfalls pounding against the pavement with a desperate urgency.

“Wait!”

He couldn’t turn around. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t look at Connor right now, not when paying him any more attention than he already had meant putting him at risk. 

Not when it might be the last time he ever saw him.

And then… 

“Kevin!”

All the blood drained from his face, his muscles going slack in Marcus’s grip. He felt himself being pivoted around as they turned to face Connor, and Kevin could see it in his face: he had realized his own mistake, just a moment too late. 

His eyes were wide, wet with the sudden gleam of tears as he opened his mouth and closed it again, obviously searching, grasping, for some way to backtrack, to take back the name he had let slip or cover it up somehow, but there was no undoing the moment. Kevin wished there was some way he could signal to him just then that it was okay. That it wasn’t his fault. That he wasn’t angry at him. Instead, Marcus spoke for him, taking a threatening step toward Connor. 

“Go back inside,” he spoke low, so as not to draw any more attention to them. 

Connor seemed to be frozen in place, too. “Please,” he whispered, his big pleading eyes flashing up to Marcus. “Please, don’t hurt him. Please. This was my fault, it was all me. He didn’t do anything wrong.”

“This is none of your concern.”

His eyes flashed back to Kevin just as the tears spilled over, trickling down the same freckled cheeks he had held between his palms only hours before. Kevin felt something in his heart blow out like a tire on the highway, throwing him out of his lane. 

“Go,” Kevin told him, his voice barely a croak. “Please, just go.”

Connor shook his head, anger and terror and grief cycling through his expression in rapid succession, unable to land on just one. His eyes flashed back up to Marcus, then to Kevin again. “No,” he barked, though the tremor in his voice undercut the attempt at confidence “No, you can’t— Please, you can’t—”

_Click._

Kevin’s eyes fell shut at the tell-tale probe of metal against his side, pressing in just beneath his ribs, just enough to hurt. He swallowed hard. Connor froze. 

“Go. The fuck. Inside.” Marcus growled. A whimper escaped Kevin’s throat as he jammed the gun harder into his side on the last word, and he heard a choked sound come from Connor at the same time. 

When Kevin dared to open his eyes, Connor was the perfect picture of a man torn in two. His palms were pressed over his mouth as if holding in a scream or another plea or vomit or all three, tears streaming down his face without restraint. He was shaking his head so softly it was barely perceptible but for the soft curls moving across his forehead, agony pouring openly from every inch of him. 

Marcus didn’t wait for a response. Confident enough that Connor wouldn’t put up any more of a fight, he turned and pulled Kevin the rest of the way to the car, unceremoniously shoving him into the backseat. His left knee jammed into the narrow crevice between the front seat and the back, the door slamming shut so fast it nearly took out his ankle. He righted himself just as Marcus climbed into the front, starting up the engine without missing a beat. As the car rumbled to life beneath him, Kevin pressed himself to the window, looking out at Connor’s frozen form that was staring right back at him. 

He took that moment to memorize every detail of his face, even as it was now, covered in tears, warped and twisted with anguish. If this was to be the last time he ever saw him, he didn’t want to forget a single bit.

* * *

When the car rolled to a stop in an empty parking lot less than a mile away from the house, tires crunching over gravel, Kevin had to press his fingertips into the material of his jeans to stop them from trembling. The absence of Connor’s sweatshirt he had left behind on the vinyl booth ached over his exposed and shivering arms. It was still mostly dark outside, with just the hint of sunrise dusting the edges of the bare trees in the early hour. There was no one around in the deadened streets; an inherent threat that need not be spoken aloud as Marcus shifted into park. 

The cut of the engine plunged them into silence, the heavy air inside the car crushing his ribs to dust beneath the pressure. Nausea rolled thick in the pit of his stomach. He pressed himself back against the seat, an instinctive urge to create as much physical distance between them as he could.

He waited. On what, he wasn’t sure. Had he taken him here to hurt him? Was he planning to tell the General what he’d seen tonight, whatever conclusion he had drawn from it? Would he… would he make Kevin bargain for his silence with the only currency he had?

Marcus had never tried anything with him before. Somehow, he felt like there would be an added layer of humiliation, doing it — whatever _it_ might be — with someone he had to essentially _work_ with every day, but it would undoubtedly be better than whatever the General would do to him if he found out Kevin was sneaking around. He could live with it, if that’s what he needed to do. He could already feel his nerves steeling, his mind closing him off from whatever awaited him. 

Marcus’s eyes were burning a hole through him in the rearview mirror, but Kevin didn’t dare look up to meet them when he spoke. “Please don’t tell him,” he whispered, opting to break the silence with the air of a man laying his own neck on a guillotine.

“Who was that?” Marcus’s voice was low and even, breezing past Kevin’s request. 

He blinked. “He, um…” Kevin’s eyes shifted back and forth, trying to think fast on his feet. “The name on his profile was Joshua.”

“Don’t bullshit me.” Kevin flinched at the sudden directness in his tone, the creak of fingers tightening around the steering wheel. “You think I don’t have access to your client profiles?” 

Marcus produced a cellphone from his jacket, tapping the screen a few times before flashing it at Kevin, revealing the photos of whatever black-haired stranger Connor had put together for his fake account of the week. Kevin wilted. 

“This isn’t the boy you were cozied up to tonight. I'm asking you again: who was it?”

The pound of Kevin’s heart was so strong he was certain Marcus would be able to feel the car shaking to its rhythm. What was he supposed to do? He couldn’t tell him who Connor was. He _wouldn’t,_ no matter what happened to Kevin in retaliation. He had promised Connor that he was safe in their stupid, reckless act of rebellion, and it was a promise he intended to keep. 

He shook his head. “I can’t.”

Surprisingly, his quiet refusal was met with an extended bout of silence instead of the lash of anger he had expected. From the front seat, Marcus took a deep breath before addressing him again. “Am I to assume this is where all the sudden overnight calls are coming from?” 

Kevin’s head jerked up to the mirror, and he was surprised to find the slightest glint of amusement in Marcus’s eyes. 

“An overnight at a cheap motel from a different account every Friday? You’re not as discreet as you think.”

“Does he…?” Kevin couldn’t even finish the sentence as his heartbeat projected up into his throat. 

“The General doesn’t know,” Marcus finished for him. “About… whatever is going on here. As far as I know, he doesn’t suspect. But it won’t take him long to find out.” He paused, adjusting and readjusting his grip on the steering wheel. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?” He asked, catching Kevin’s eyes in the mirror. 

The question caught him off guard for all the wrong reasons. 

Was he? Trying to get himself killed? It certainly hadn’t been a conscious decision; he had simply been desperate for a reprieve from the misery, if only a temporary one. But he would be kidding himself if he said the idea hadn’t crossed his mind somewhere along the line of a year. Maybe more times than he was willing to admit. Less so, certainly, since he had met Connor. But it was undeniable in every time he hesitated at the General’s commands, wondering how much resistance it would take to provoke him to the kind of violence he couldn't’ come back from. Undeniable in the self-made slit in the side of his mattress, concealed between his bed and the wall, holding a collection of the pills he had refused to swallow, saved up as an escape route he’d never been brave enough to take.

He kept his eyes low when he responded, less sure of his answer than he had been moments ago. 

“No.”

Marcus expelled a long sigh, his hands dropping into his lap. “What, then? An attempt at running off? We both know what happens if you do that.”

Hot, prickly shame spread under his skin as a well of tears spilled over the brims of Kevin’s eyes. He hunched himself against the car door as tightly as he could, hating himself for crying in front of this man and wishing he would just do whatever it was he was going to do to Kevin so it would be over with already. “I wasn’t,” he pleaded. “I promise. Please, don’t tell him. Please.”

To both his immediate relief and dread, Marcus conceded surprisingly quickly. “I’m not going to.”

Kevin’s throat closed up as he tried to force his next words out, wondering if he would have to get into the front seat for this, or if Marcus would climb into the back with him. If it would hurt, or if it would be at least physically painless and be over soon so he could go back to his shitty spring mattress and sleep off this hell morning. Maybe he would even be granted a lukewarm shower before he went to bed.

He pinched his eyes shut tight at the possibility of either, unable to look him in the eyes when he asked. “What do I have to do?”

There was a beat of silence that felt like an eternity, Kevin’s fingers digging into his own thighs as he awaited instructions. 

“I’m not—” Marcus’s eyes narrowed momentarily in what could have been mistaken for a wince. “That’s not what I’m after.”

Kevin blinked. “What?”

“You don’t have to do… _Jesus Christ.”_ He muttered the last part under his breath, the unreadable tone in his voice making Kevin shift uneasily in his seat. Marcus hesitated before meeting his eyes in the mirror once again. “Look, I don’t know what the fuck you’re up to, but whatever it is was enough to make you run when you got caught.” It was Kevin’s turn to wince. “You’re going places you weren’t approved to go, with people you’re not supposed to be with, sneaking around and giving out your _name._ What did you think would happen?”

“I’m still getting the money. Why do the details matter?” An old, forgotten spark of resistance flared in his chest, fueled by the anger and resentment he kept buried deep, fanned by the grief of having the one, good thing in his life ripped away from him tonight.

“Try using that argument with the General when we get back,” Macrus shot back, his voice cold and distant. “See how far it gets you.”

That extinguished the spark before it could ignite. The only place it would get him, as they both well knew, was maybe the basement for a week. If he was lucky. With the General, there was only total compliance or there was direct defiance, no middle ground. And this — what he was doing with Connor, everything that Marcus had pointed out — would certainly be perceived as the latter, arguments and intentions aside. It had been made abundantly clear to Kevin, time and again over the past year, that he was only worth keeping around as long as his monetary value outweighed his trouble, and he wasn’t confident this incident wouldn’t tip the scale. He was stuck, and they both knew it. 

“So what do you want then? If you’re not…” He didn’t say the words, unwilling to tempt fate in case he changed his mind.

“Don’t do it again,” Marcus said flatly. “Whoever that was, whatever... it’s over. Done.”

“How am I supposed to…?” Kevin clenched his jaw, choosing his words carefully. “I go where I’m told. I don’t really get much say in the selection process.” His words dripped with acidity despite his efforts. Marcus fell quiet again, and Kevin would have been pleased with the accomplishment of catching him in the truth if he wasn’t still so terrified. 

“I’ll take care of it,” Marcus said finally.

Kevin’s heart sank. “Please don’t hurt him,” he breathed, barely a whisper. “This… this isn’t his fault, please.”

“You really should have thought about his safety when you dragged him into this, don’t you think?”

He was right, and Kevin knew it. He had been so selfish to bring Connor anywhere near this. There was a reason he had run off after their first night together, and he would have been smart to stick to his guns. He should have fought harder the week before when Connor pushed back against his attempts to end things. 

But _goddammit._ He was only fucking _human._ At that, he was a human who had spent the better part of a year being beaten and starved and raped on a daily basis, and all he had done, all he had _ever_ done in that time, was begrudgingly accept one opportunity for kindness when it was offered to him. And now Connor was going to be the one to pay the price.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Kevin’s voice broke under a sob, his body curling in on itself as his shoulders shook. “I’m still getting the money, I’m still… I’m still...” He hiccupped in a breath, struggling for air. _“Fuck. Please._ Just leave him out of this. I’ll do whatever you want.”

Marcus tore a hand through his own hair, exasperated. “I already fucking told you, you don’t have to do that. Stop saying it.”

The harshness in his tone was in direct conflict with the words that should have been at least somewhat comforting, but the contradiction only served to confuse Kevin more. Much to his own dismay, Kevin started crying harder. He thought he heard another muttered curse under Marcus’s breath. 

“Look.” The even directness in Marcus’s voice was back, leveling Kevin in the mirror. “He’s not going to be hurt. And I’m not going to tell the General. Just… know that I’ll be taking a closer look at your clients from now on. Trust me, that’s the best of the options in front of you, kid.”

Kevin swallowed, trying to make sense of his words, of the strange fucking conversation and the whole whirlwind of a night. If there was one thing he knew, it was that he made a good point about his options. And that, really, any decisions to be made were not Kevin’s at all. All that mattered, he supposed, was that Marcus gave his word that Connor wouldn’t be implicated in all this. All Kevin was left to do was cling to the hope that his word could be trusted.

* * *

It was nearly 9 a.m. when Connor finally came to a stop in front of his driveway. The muscles in both arms shook from the strain of gripping onto the steering wheel so tightly for the entire drive. What was normally an hour trip back from the city had taken him nearly three from all the time he spent pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway, dry heaving and gasping for air between sobs. He’d had panic attacks before, a symptom of a lifelong struggle with anxiety, but none of them had compared to how he felt now: wrung out, exhausted, numb but somehow with just enough juice left in his battery to continue feeling the horror that pulsed through his veins with every heartbeat. 

He couldn’t even say how or when he managed to make it from his car to the front door of his house, but at some point he found himself fumbling with his keys, dropping them onto the porch a minimum of twice from the trembling in his hands. He prayed that his parents would be asleep when he walked in, or at least, distracted enough not to notice that their son looked like he’d been run over by a train. That was surely how he felt, at any rate. 

Luckily, the house was quiet when he walked in, save for the soft melody of worship music playing from the tiny radio in the kitchen on the other side of the house. He knew his mother would be too preoccupied with breakfast to hear him coming in, so he snuck away to his bedroom down the hall as stealthily as he could, closing and locking the door behind him. 

He didn’t even make it a single step forward. The moment the lock clicked into place, Connor’s legs gave out from under him, his back falling against the door as he dissolved into sobs. He slid down to the carpet, his shirt riding up against the wood as he went, and wrapped his arms around his knees. He broke. Shattered, right there on his bedroom floor, muffling his cries as best he could against his knee.

Kevin had been caught. Kevin had been taken, had had a _gun_ held to him, for what Connor horrifyingly assumed was not the first time. Kevin was probably being hurt, right now, because of Connor’s own reckless choices. He could be… he could be _killed._ Because of his complicity. Because of all the times he could have stepped in and done something and refused. Because of all the times he’d stared down the phone number to helplines and anonymous tip lines and was too scared to make the call. 

The events of the night tore through his memory, a disorienting rush of highs and lows that left him reeling. He could see it, feel it all at once: Kevin’s hand in his, holding him upright. Cold slab of ice on his back, Kevin’s chest pressed on top of him. The warmth of the car. The memory of Kevin’s lips on his, gently calloused fingertips brushing his jaw. Kevin’s eyes, wide and full of fear. The tall man in the leather jacket, perhaps the face behind the horror story he only knew pieces of. The gun pressed into Kevin’s side.

Had that been the man Kevin was sold to? Was that the same person Connor corresponded with on a weekly basis in the message threads? The person who left Kevin with bruises he never liked to talk about? Connor hadn’t even had the opportunity to ask before he had dragged Kevin off the floor of the diner and out into the parking lot. Everything had happened so fast. 

And now Kevin was gone, and he had no way of knowing if he would ever see him again. 

That thought was nearly enough on its own to bring him crashing down, snapping the last of the string that tethered him to sanity, but a _ping_ on his phone pulled him back to the surface long enough to retrieve it from his pocket. The screen lit up with a single notification from Tinder. 

From Leo. 

Hands shaking even harder, Connor swiped his phone open, and he stopped breathing.

_**If you value his life at all, this will be the last time you interact with this profile. From any account.** _

He had only a moment to process the message before it disappeared from his screen, an error message popping up in its place. When he went back to the list of message threads, Leo’s profile had disappeared altogether. He had unmatched him. Probably blocked. 

Connor threw his phone across the room where it thumped against his headboard before falling unsatisfyingly onto his pillows. His fingers tightened in his hair as he fought to hold the scream in his throat. He was breaking. Shattering. He didn’t know what to do. What he _should_ do. What he _could_ do that wouldn’t put Kevin’s life even more at risk. He was not equipped to be dealing with something of his magnitude, which immediately felt like a selfish fucking thought, because neither was Kevin, or anyone like him in his situation. But he didn’t have a choice. 

With his last bit of strength, Connor pushed himself to his knees and crawled over to his nightstand. He reached for the book he kept in the drawer, shaky fingers peeling open the cover to retrieve the note he kept there. The note he had kept there since the day they met. Carefully, he curled the tiny sheet of paper into his fist, wrapping the other hand around it before bringing both to his face. He closed his eyes and pressed his closed hands to his forehead, hunching over in what might have looked from the outside like an imitation of a prayer. And maybe in a way it was. 

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, fresh tears making their way down his face. 

Eventually, he felt himself slip into a sitting position beside the bed, though he was no longer the one operating his own body. He tipped over, letting himself fall onto his side. He curled up there on his floor, tears running down into the carpet. He thought of Kevin until sleep took him over, and long after that, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am Absolutely Not about to get all sappy about this, but New Year's always has me all reflective and emotional. Even though this year has largely been a shit show, it is also the year that I joined this fandom and actively started writing again for the first time in what was far too long. I've met people here that I consider true friends, and I've written more than I ever have in any year prior. Both of those things mean a lot to me, as does this story in particular, as does the continued readership of all you lovelies who have given me feedback along the way. Just know I really appreciate you and I'm glad to be in this together. That's all.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The response I got from my last chapter was simply... the best I could have asked for? Thank you to everyone who had a kind (or generally enthusiastic) word for me. I'd really like to tell you that was the peak of terrible for our boys, but like... what is that saying about darkness before dawn? Yeah. That. I The next few chapters have been some of the most taxing to write, but I really hope they come through the way I hope for them to. 
> 
> I just got a new job, so I'm back to being a corporate shill and therefor will have less time to write. BUT, with that in mind, I do have the next couple of chapters on standby and just in need of some TLC before they can be posted. ANYWAY. I really hope you all enjoy this chapter and the rest of the story's progression :)
> 
> **extra content warning here for depictions of sexual assault/violence**

As far as Kevin could tell, Marcus had kept his word about not telling the General what he saw. He also hadn’t pressed Kevin for any more information about Connor, which was maybe even more of a relief. It had been a tense and silent dance between the two of them all week; Kevin would catch him holding his gaze just a moment longer than usual in the rearview mirror of the car on a drive home, and he would think to himself: _this is it. This is when he goes back on his word and takes him up on the offer of payment for his silence._ But each time, the weighted gaze would falter as soon as it came, and neither of them said anything about it.

It had been a full week since the encounter at the diner and the subsequent conversation in the dark parking lot — a full week since Connor had cradled his face between his hands like something precious and kissed him in his warm car — and for the most part, things had gone back to normal. But if normalcy in Kevin’s world was bleak before, it was utterly gray and lifeless now, dulled at every edge and corner. 

Without the promise of a Friday night with Connor at the end of the week, Kevin’s days became unbearably long. Had time always dragged so slowly before they met? Or was it worse now? He was sure that it was. It was as if Connor had awakened something in him that he thought he’d killed off long ago in order to survive. Slowly, without even meaning to, he had stripped down all his walls, lowered his shield, and now Kevin was thrown back into battle utterly defenseless. He had torn himself open for Connor, ripped right down the middle and exposed all the softest, most vulnerable parts that lived inside him. 

And then Connor had been stolen away before he could patch himself back up, forced into the beds of strangers with his heart open and bleeding. It was harder to block out the feeling of their hands on his body now, harder to ignore the whispered words against his ear now that he knew what it felt like to kiss someone who cared for him. Someone he wanted to kiss back all on his own. The torture of it all felt fresher now, more potent than it had since the beginning, back before he’d learned how to escape into himself, how to keep the tears at bay unless he wanted to risk being hurt twice. 

By halfway into the week, Kevin knew he needed some assistance if he had any chance of surviving this without Connor. 

The “rainy day” stash of pills he kept hidden in the slit alongside his mattress had gone mostly untouched for the better part of the year, only adding to it when it was safe to do so, when he had the mental energy to spare for a sober night with a client. It wasn’t all that often, and he hadn’t added even one since the night he met Connor. There had never been any concrete plans, even on the darker days, but his dirty, little secret was something that was entirely his own when nothing else was. In such a helpless situation, it gave him the faintest illusion of control, even if he was pretty sure he would never be able to bring himself to do anything with it. 

Until now. 

He wasn’t using it for the purpose he had originally intended when he started hoarding the tiny, white pills one by one all those months ago, but if he snuck one per night — maybe two — along with the nightly pill the General set out for them, then maybe he would have a better chance at fading away when he needed to most throughout the night. It was a dangerous game, he was well aware. As if he hadn’t already accrued enough lasting trauma in the past year, stacking his cards further into the territory of addiction was hardly the smart move. But Kevin found himself less and less capable of caring about being smart, and really about his future in general, because he was pretty sure, at this point, there wouldn’t be much of one for him beyond the confines of _this._ and if _this_ was what the rest of his life would look like, there was no use in depriving himself of any amount of relief he could get his hands on. 

Friday, when it inevitably came, was harder than the rest. He felt it as soon as he woke up in the morning: the hollow ache in his chest. As if the memory of Connor and the promised refuge of their weekly routine was embedded into his bones, their absence as vital and painful as missing a part of his physical form. He had barely opened his eyes before his hand slipped between his mattress and the wall, refusing to start the day sober. 

He was still buzzing from the first pill when he and James were called out for the night. 

Long, wispy strings of light blurred past the car window as they made their way into the city. The buildings that towered overhead in every direction swayed a bit in his vision. His client must be a rich one. They were deep in the heart of the city, speeding along Michigan Avenue. His heart wrenched with a near-physical pain at the memory of his night with Connor at the Bean, on the ice, in the park, by the lake. He squeezed his eyes shut to push down the pain of the memory, but the image of Connor’s windblown cheeks was only that much clearer behind his eyelids.

A soft hand nudged his where it rested on the leather upholstery. He blinked up to see James studying him with a look of concern from across the seat. _You okay?_ He mouthed. Kevin nodded.

Pausing to glance at Marcus’s reflection in the rearview mirror, James slid over to him, just close enough for their upper arms to touch. The skin-to-skin contact was a welcome reprieve from the cold, what with the insufficient clothing they were given to combat the dropping temperatures. If Marcus objected to, or even noticed, their rearrangement in the backseat, he gave no indication. Out of the corner of his eye, Kevin was pretty sure he saw his finger lift to the heater dial on the dash, ticking it up a notch. 

“Chris is gone tomorrow,” James whispered, low enough for only Kevin to hear over the car radio.

Kevin wasn’t proud to admit it took him a half second longer than it should have to place the name. After everything that had happened the last week, and the mix of drugs in his system, he had almost forgotten about the boy in the basement James was sneaking food to every morning. From what he’d heard, he was honestly a bit surprised he had lasted this long. 

“Is he…?” Kevin didn’t look at him when they spoke, paying some sort of silent, preemptive respect to the stranger he had never met.

“He’s not going to kill him.”

At that, Kevin looked up.

“I heard him talking on the phone,” James continued. “Something about an arrangement for a tradeoff over the weekend.” His voice dropped even lower, another careful glance tossed toward the front seat before he spoke again. “There’s a falsified passport involved.”

Shit. 

It was always the defiant ones. The ones who didn’t quite break under the same pressure that cracked James and Kevin and the countless others that had passed through. Those were the ones that couldn’t be trusted to go out alone and make money, and without that, they were disposable to the General. A waste of investment and resources. It was never made explicitly clear, beyond what the General could leverage as a threat in their direction, what happened to the boys that were sent away. But Kevin and James had lost the luxury of naivety a long time ago, and they knew that a fake passport and the urgent need for a disappearance could only add up to a nightmare scenario. One they knew was nearly impossible to come back from. 

“I’m sorry, James,” Kevin whispered, because he didn’t know what else to say. “I know you were… fond of him.”

“I tried to tell him.” James blinked away the hint of moisture that welled in his eyes, barely visible in the shadow of the backseat. “I tried to warn him about what could happen, but he’s so…” He broke off in some iteration of a humorless laugh. “So fucking stubborn,” he finished the thought with the slightest hint of a rueful smile that Kevin tried his best to return.

“Hey,” Kevin said, keeping his voice low enough to stay out of Marcus’s range. “You never know. Maybe all that stubbornness will be what brings him back alive.”

It was a lie, and they both knew it. Still, James nodded as if he believed it, placing a discreet hand over Kevin’s and squeezing gently. Because when this was what reality looked like for them, it was the small pockets of conceivable fiction that allowed them to survive.

* * *

Kevin made it all of four steps into the corridor off the lobby before he realized he might have taken a wrong turn. The fancier hotels were harder to navigate, and the drugs made it damn near impossible. There were openings to several more hallways and rooms lining both sides of the long stretch ahead of him, signs for the hotel bar, the laundry room, the fitness center, the pool. He could have sworn he saw the sign for the elevator over this way. Maybe he was mistaken for the bathroom? All the signs were a little wavy in his vision. It was entirely possible. 

When he spun around to reroute, he ran almost head-on into a young woman, a few inches shorter than him. He blinked, stumbling back on unsteady legs. The sharp movement threw off his delicate equilibrium, and he might have fallen completely on his ass in the middle of the fancy hotel hallway if it weren’t for the stranger’s hand catching his elbow. 

“Whoa, are you okay?” The young woman had a soft voice and an accent he didn’t quite recognize. When he pinched his eyes shut, once, twice, her face came slightly more into focus. She was young— about his age, probably, with dark skin and curly hair and eyes that looked more genuine than he could afford to believe. She was wearing a nametag with the hotel’s logo. Immediately, he dropped his gaze. 

“I’m fine,” he said, already making a move to step around her. 

Hotel employees were generally not his friends, especially at the higher end. The ones that weren’t downright oblivious were put off by his presence, either suspecting what he was and eyeing him with disgust or pity, or assuming he was homeless and had wandered in for the brief shelter and a bathroom break. Either way, one look was usually all it took for them to decide he didn’t belong in a place like this. Especially in the state he was in tonight.

“Are you sure?” She rotated her body, not enough to box him in, but enough to stop him in his tracks. “You look…” The pause was long enough to be uncomfortable, and Kevin cringed because whatever commentary she had about his appearance was probably nothing more than he was all too aware of. “Lost,” she finished. 

Kevin kept his eyes low, narrowed in on her name tag — Nabalungi, it said — until he realized how it might look like he was just staring at her chest and switched strategies, looking instead just past her shoulder. 

“I’m trying to find the elevator,” he admitted. “I’m… meeting a friend.”

He could feel her eyeing him with something he hoped was nothing more than annoyance, and certainly nothing like suspicion, which might lead her to do something. _Please don’t call the cops,_ was the prayer looping in his head. _I can’t be hurt like that again._

“It’s down the hall, on the left,” she said, finally breaking her intense gaze. “You’ll see the business center in the alcove, it’s right across from that.”

“Thanks,” he murmured, turning to venture down the hall. 

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she called after him. 

Tension drew Kevin’s shoulders up to his ears as he stopped again. The smile he forced took every bit of effort he had in him, and even then he could feel the way it fizzled out before it could reach his eyes. He turned back to her anyway, just for a moment. “I’m sure,” he said. “Thank you.”

He moved faster down the hall that time — as fast as his sluggish body would allow him to — feeling her gaze on his back the whole way. She didn’t call out to him again. 

The elevators were right where she promised they would be; three sets of golden doors that were just smooth enough to show a fuzzy reflection of his silhouette when he stood in front of them. He pressed the call button and checked the room number written in sharpie on his hand. He didn’t have the strength to wonder about the client he would meet behind the door tonight. The drugs were enough to mute his morbid curiosity, but unfortunately nowhere near enough to take the edge off the sharp slice of reality that whoever it was, it wouldn’t be Connor. 

He stood alone in the elevator bay as he waited, swaying slightly on his feet. Hotel patrons in sleek, black suits and dresses passed by in the adjacent main hall, their voices low and bubbling with tipsy laughter, probably out for a long night of expensive drinking. Their movement drew his eyes to the left, and when the small crowd dispersed from his line of sight, he was left staring at the small room across the hall. The business center, the woman had called it when she directed him. Most of the room appeared to extend behind a wall, but the entryway was encased in glass, revealing the edge of a desktop computer, a black leather office chair, a printer, and… 

And a phone. 

A single, modernized landline with a spiral cord hanging from the edge of the built-in desk. 

_Ding._

Kevin blinked out of his momentary trance at the arrival of the elevator, stepping back to make way for the group of more business-formal guests that spilled out around him, into the hall. He was still left standing there when the doors closed again. 

There was an analog clock embedded in the marble wall above the elevators, which told him he had six minutes until the arranged meeting time with his client. It was a risk, deviating too much from the time constraint. If tonight’s mystery client happened to be an impatient one, it wouldn’t be Kevin on the receiving end of the “where are you” messages to Leo’s account, and the last thing he wanted to do was give the General — or Marcus — any reason to be suspicious of his behavior. 

But it was six minutes. And it was a phone. And Kevin didn’t know when he would get a chance like this again. 

Before he’d even consciously made his decision, his legs were already moving in the direction of the business center, like a moth to a flame. He looked both ways as he crossed the wide hallway, wary of… what? He wasn’t sure. But the paranoia clung to him like static over his skin, sure that every eye was watching him, that someone would come and rip the opportunity away from him before he could even make an attempt, drag him back to the General. 

No one did. No one even glanced in his direction as he wrapped his sweaty palm around the golden handle of the glass door and pulled it open, stepping inside. The peripheral noise from the lobby cut to a distant muffle as soon as the door closed behind him. He took a step forward, then another, peeking around the corner of the solid wall to see if there was anyone else in the small room. He was alone. 

Kevin flexed his hands at his sides as he drew nearer, wetting his dry lips with the tip of his tongue, his eyes a narrow beam that saw nothing but the object in front of him. He became suddenly hyper-aware of his own heartbeat, hammering fast and hard in his ribcage, his fingertips thrumming with the pulse. A thousand possibilities raced through his head at once. He could call his mother, though there was no way to be sure she even had the same phone number after all this time. Worse yet, he didn’t even know where she would stand on hearing from him at all. There was always a possibility she would hang up the phone the second she heard his voice. After all, she had never really come looking for him after he ran away. The General told him as much. 

He could call the police. He could do it, right here, right now. There was even a chance, no matter how slight, that Connor had been right from the beginning; that there was a way they could help without anyone else getting hurt in his place. That there was a way _out._

But of course, there was a chance that Connor was wrong. And the consequences of that were exactly the same that had kept him in chains for a year. 

When he was standing in front of the phone, though, his fingers resting lightly over the plastic handset, there wasn’t a question of who he would call. There hadn’t been, really, since he spotted it from across the elevator bay. 

It was the number that lived eternally in his pocket, faded and smudged in the folded up sheet of hotel stationary. He didn’t need to take it out — he already had it memorized — but he did anyway, clutching it tightly in his free palm as he picked up the phone and dialed. 

On the first ring, he stopped breathing.

* * *

His tears were mostly dry by the time he reached his client’s floor, but he rubbed at his eyes anyway, ridding himself of as much evidence as he could. The unit number on his palm was smudged into a shapeless ink blot by this point, but he remembered it from before anyway. At least he was pretty sure he did. His foggy brain wasn’t exactly at peak performance. He would find out soon, he supposed, as he approached 1028, giving one last cautionary swipe under his reddened eyes.

He stopped in front of the door, pressing a palm to the flat of his stomach. Closing his eyes. Breathing out through his nose.

God, he didn’t want to do this. 

He really didn’t want to do this. No amount of drugs in his system could soften the blow enough to make this okay. Still, he raised a hand and knocked. Waited. Each moment that passed in the silent stillness of the hallway was another opportunity to build anticipation. Dread.

Kevin took an involuntary step backward when the door swung open without warning, blinking dumbly up at the man on the other side. The chestnut hair and sparkling, brown eyes were immediately recognizable, and Kevin’s heart stalled in his chest, legs rod-stiff and frozen to the carpet. 

“Hi,” Eric greeted with one hand braced against the door frame, leaning casually to one side. The few inches he had on Kevin suddenly felt like a much greater distance as he shrank under his gaze.The instinct to run was overpowering, but apparently not as strong as the shock that kept him planted. 

His reaction, whatever it might have looked like from the outside, must have been the desired one, because Eric’s smile quirked up to one side as he appraised him in a way that made him feel like he was wearing much less than the t-shirt and jeans he had on. He had, of course, worn less in front of him before — a reminder that needed no prompting as he unconsciously wrapped his arms around himself.

“Hi.” The crack in Kevin’s voice split the syllable in two.

“Please, come in.” Eric’s voice was all surface-level politeness and pleasantries, in direct conflict with the troublesome glint in his eye. 

And Kevin didn’t really have a choice, other than the one he supposed he always had, which wasn’t much of a choice at all. Marcus would still be planted outside at their discussed location since this wasn’t an overnight call, ready to collect him when the hour was up. This was his last call of the night. He could always run back to the car, climb in wordlessly and wait for Marcus to take him back to the house. But doing so empty handed prompted far more danger for him than anything that Eric would have to offer him inside this hotel room. 

Wordlessly, he stepped inside, squeezing past the narrow margin Eric allowed between his body and the frame. The proximity was just subtle enough not to be called deliberate, giving Kevin no choice but to brush against him as he passed through. It wasn’t until the door clicked shut that he realized he was shaking. He jumped at Eric’s sudden presence behind him as he stopped at the mouth of the short entryway, but he only lingered long enough to scoot around him and into the main room.

Kevin waited, unsure of how to proceed. There was so much unspoken information being exchanged in the simple fact that he was here. Clearly, that communicated something; an answer to the silent question from the ice rink he’d never really needed confirmed. Eric recognized him, and had all along. That much wasn’t necessarily news to Kevin. The bigger question was why he felt the need to conceal that information in the moment. And more importantly, why he had gone through the effort of tracking Kevin down again to bring him here. 

He wasn’t sure he wanted to find out, but knew that he was about to.

“Relax.” Eric tossed what could have been mistaken for a friendly smile over his shoulder as he crossed to the dresser across the room, picking up a single glass of amber liquid. “I don’t bite.”

He took a swig, and Kevin’s eyes trailed down to the glass bottle behind him. Nearly a third of it was gone. He waited a beat, expecting him to offer him a drink, unsure of whether he was dreading it or hoping for it. When the offer never came, he felt himself fidgeting, hyper-aware of every inch of himself under the heavy-lidded gaze that tracked him from across the room. 

“Not very chatty, are you?” Eric chuckled before throwing back the rest of his drink. Kevin winced at the phantom burn of whiskey in his throat. He was sure, given what little he knew about Eric, that it was the expensive kind. Strong. “I guess that makes sense. McKinley probably does enough talking for both of you when you’re together, huh?”

Something in Kevin was reflexively defensive against the way he talked about Connor, like there was a hidden insult in the way he said it. But the mention of him was enough to push Kevin to find his voice, a hopeful realization sparking to life. “Did… did Connor send you to talk to me?”

This seemed to pique Eric’s attention. He raised an eyebrow. “Why wouldn’t he come see you himself?”

So, _no_ then. Which meant Connor didn’t have anything to do with this. And very likely didn’t know about it. It also meant that, in asking the question, Kevin had revealed more of his cards than he had intended to.

“I…” Kevin blinked, trying to recover, but fear was filling in all the blank spaces in his mind like cold water flooding a sinking ship. “I don’t know, I just thought—” 

His words were cut off by a swallow as Eric took a step toward him, Kevin countering with a step backward. Eric laughed again, his eyebrows raising slightly at his reaction. He raised his palms in a placating gesture, even as he continued his saunter toward him.

“Awful fucking tense for someone who fucks strangers for a living, Leo.” He took another step forward and Kevin’s back hit the wall. Eric’s eyes narrowed in on him, like predator to prey. “Or… sorry, was it Kevin?”

His breath hitched in his throat, the strained rise and fall of his ribcage pressing him further into the drywall. There was no more room to shrink away when Eric raised a hand in his direction, so Kevin just froze under the graze of knuckles down his cheek, around his jawline. There was a part of him that couldn’t believe this was happening, but an even larger part still that absolutely could. 

Eric was hardly the first closet case Kevin had encountered. Men who hid their desires in the shadows, even from themselves, saw people like him as a secure outlet; a body that couldn’t refuse, and a mouth that couldn’t speak of it after. They were the roughest, sometimes, taking out all their pent-up resentment and a lifetime full of repression out on him, as if he had anything to do with it. He’d seen the barest glimmer of that in Eric from day one, and now his suspicions were confirmed in the worst possible conclusion.

Any lingering threads of hope that Eric was here under nobler motives were snapped the second he pressed forward, pushing his lips down onto Kevin’s. The faint noise of protest was swallowed up by his mouth as he forced Kevin’s open, pushing an intrusive tongue past his lips. Kevin’s hands curled into fists at his sides, months and months of survival instinct telling him not to raise them, not to push him away, not to fight back no matter how much he wanted to. That it would only hurt worse for him if he did. 

But this was different. Not the act itself, surely, but the person. The circumstance. This was Connor’s _friend,_ or at least someone he thought of as such. The idea of going along with this felt like a betrayal that he couldn’t choke down. Kevin couldn’t do this. Not with him.

“Stop.” He jerked his head back hard enough to smack into the wall behind him, but he could barely feel the pain through his panic. His hands came up to push against Eric’s chest, but he quickly found himself pinned to the wall, thick fingers gripping onto his jaw with bruising force. He stilled. 

“Connor told me some things about you,” Eric whispered, his whiskey-stale breath invading Kevin’s space. His lips traveled down the side of Kevin’s jaw as his fingers lazily covered his mouth.

“W-what?” Kevin whispered from behind Eric’s hand.

Eric didn’t bother pausing his assault as he responded, but Kevin could almost feel the way his lips turned up into a smile against his throat. “It isn’t really up to you to say ‘stop,’ is it?”

A heavy beat of silence was all it took for understanding to fall over Kevin, and when it did, his body went numb, slack against the wall, only held up by Eric’s weight pressed against him. He knew. He _knew_ that Kevin was here on the direction of someone else. That he did not, in fact, have the power to decline this. Connor had told him. 

His eyes were wide over Eric’s shoulder as his instincts warred with each other, screaming at him to stay still, to endure. Begging him to resist. He felt his hands come up again with the intent of pushing him away, but instead, his trembling fingers ended up clutching to the larger man’s shoulders in an attempt to steady himself. Tears brimmed at his eyes, and he pulled in a shuddering breath. “Please, Connor wouldn’t…”

“Shhh. Connor won’t find out, will he?” There was an unmistakable hardness pressing into his pelvis and he felt himself beginning to slip. Into his head. Into Leo. Into whatever it took to survive this. 

Thick fingers knotted painfully into his hair, and Kevin felt himself being pushed downward. His body followed the silent command on instinct, folding obediently under the pressure, eyes going blank as his knees hit the carpet. He cringed at the sound of a zipper, turning his head away only to have a rough hand yank him back into place by his hair. Kevin tried to pull his tongue away from the roof of his mouth, dry and sticky from fear, but all of his muscles were paralyzed, locked in place. He couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. It was only when Eric was fully exposed in front of him that he struggled again.

“No,” he growled, the word feeling almost foreign on his tongue as he pushed against Eric’s thighs. The hand in his hair tightened, making him cry out in pain, but he didn’t let up. He pushed himself sideways off of his knees, trying to wedge his way out from between Eric and the wall. His hands came up to claw at the wrist that held his head in place, scratching until he felt skin break under his fingernails. 

Eric hissed and released his grip long enough for Kevin to scramble back away from him, skittering across the carpet. He used the dresser to pull himself up just as Eric advanced on him, ducking out of his grasp before he could pin him against the wall again, but he spun quickly enough to snatch Kevin’s shirt as he tried to skirt past him, the neckline tearing as he strained against it. He didn’t even have time to react to the sharp crack of a backhand across his face, splitting his lip. He cried out again as his arm was twisted painfully behind him, his body slammed over the surface of the dresser. The tray of pre-packaged coffee grounds and cups clattered to the floor as Kevin struggled, the two crystal glasses cracking on impact, shards breaking off into the thin carpet. He kicked out behind him, trying to catch any part of Eric’s body, but he quickly countered Kevin’s move, shoving a leg between Kevin’s to pin him against the wood.

The adrenaline that coursed through him was different from that which he had become accustomed to. For the first time in a year, it served not to still him, to make him freeze in a cruel imitation of compliance, but instead gave him the instinct to _fight_ for himself. Something he hadn’t done, not like this, since the beginning.

“Get off me,” he growled, bucking against his hold. He was all-too aware of Eric’s hardness behind him, pressing into him as he struggled, and the knowledge that it would be too easy for him to get what he wanted from Kevin in this position. At that panicked realization, he managed to get in a blow with the elbow that wasn’t pinned down, knocking Eric back just long enough to worm out of his hold. Kevin collapsed to the ground and started crawling, scrambling toward the door, but Eric was on him in an instant, crushing him beneath his weight on carpet. 

For a horrifying moment, Kevin thought he had him. That this was it, that all his fighting had been for nothing. He let out a broken sob as Eric’s hands pushed their way under his hips, fumbling to find the button of his jeans. His cheek flattened hard against the floor as his body went limp, sending out some telepathic apology to Connor, telling him how sorry he was for not being strong enough to stop this.

But then he opened his eyes. Across from him, several feet away on the carpet, he caught a glint of light reflecting off a large shard of glass; of one of the items they had toppled off the dresser in their struggle. He had no time to hesitate, no time to think his plan over if he had any chance of getting out of here before things could go too far. When Eric focused his attention on yanking down the waistband of his jeans, Kevin threw an arm out to the side, clamping his hand around the broken glass. The sting against his own palm didn’t even register. Clamping his eyes shut and praying for the best, he thrust his arm behind him with as much power as he could leverage in his position. 

“Ah, _fuck!”_ Eric cried out as he made contact, and Kevin didn’t waste the narrow window of opportunity to wriggle himself onto his back. 

Face to face, he saw that the glass had struck Eric’s arm, a long gash of red bleeding down to the crease of his elbow. Kevin didn’t think. He wielded it again, less blindly this time as he aimed for the face. And he succeeded. The sharp howl of pain and both of the larger man’s hands leaving his body to cover the bloody wound below his eye gave Kevin the opening he needed to scramble out from under his weight. 

Eric didn’t pursue him this time. 

Kevin couldn’t even risk stopping to look back at the person he’d left bleeding on the hotel floor. He stumbled to his feet, grasping weakly at the wall for support. It wasn’t until he reached the door that he realized he was still clamping down on the makeshift weapon. He stopped just long enough to uncurl his fist, cringing at the deep line of blood that cut across his palm. Surely when the adrenaline wore off, that would hurt like a bitch, but he couldn’t think about that now. Every thought, every nerve ending and instinct in his body was screaming the same thing at him, all at once: run. 

So he dropped the glass, and he did. 

Rubber soles smacked against the thin carpet of the hallway, then even louder against the concrete steps in the stairwell. The elevator was too risky, too slow, and he couldn’t even bear the thought of standing still that long. The cold wind smacked him in the face the moment he was out the side door at the bottom of the stairs, but he didn’t stop running. 

Marcus was in the parking lot of the cafe two blocks down, as arranged, the tail-end of the sedan poking out from behind the dumpsters. With more concentration than it should have required, Kevin forced himself to slow his pace before he got to the car. The split lip and blood staining his skin and clothes might have been enough to raise questions, but it was hardly the first time Kevin had climbed into the backseat bloody and wrecked, so it wouldn’t be impossible to play off if he was careful. 

He tapped his knuckles twice against the back window and heard the lock shift open after just a moment. Wordlessly, Kevin opened the door and slid into the seat, the leather upholstery cold underneath him. He tucked himself against the far door, curling up in an effort to still the trembling in his muscles, his face turned away. A beat of silence passed, undercut with the soft rumble of the idling engine. Kevin kept his eyes unfocused in the direction of the tinted window, waiting to feel the car move. Instead, he felt Marcus’s eyes narrow in on him in the rearview mirror. 

“What happened?” He asked in his usual gruff tone. 

Kevin didn’t bother looking away from the window when he responded. “He got rough.”

“That was barely fifteen minutes.”

Kevin huffed out a humorless breath. “Yeah, well. He didn’t waste any time.”

Another beat of silence followed, and Kevin really hoped he would just drop it. The open wound in his hand was starting to sting as he came down, and he cradled it in his lap as discreetly as he could, squeezing around his wrist to slow the blood flow to his palm. It was getting hard to think past the pain, past the aftershocks of panic and adrenaline.

“And he paid you?”

This was where Kevin faltered, squeezing his eyes shut. He’d known, of course. Somewhere in the back of his mind, beyond the immediate reaction of fight or flight or freeze, he knew the consequences of the choice he was making when he pushed Eric away. When he dared, for the first time in a year, to tell someone _no_ and leave empty handed. He hadn’t allowed himself to linger on it, or else he wouldn’t have been able to force himself out of the room. 

He had made his choice. And now he would have to live with it. 

“Yes,” he lied effortlessly. 

Marcus released a heavy sigh from the driver’s seat, and Kevin breathed his own relief as he let it drop. He didn’t bother looking up as he heard him rummaging through the center console, then the faint crinkling of something in his hands after he clicked it shut. It wasn’t until he cleared his throat that Kevin turned his head. Wordlessly, Marcus extended a single tissue out to him, his arm twisted somewhat awkwardly behind him so that he didn’t have to turn around and face him as he did so.

Kevin blinked at the offering, then up at the mirror where Marcus was pointedly avoiding his eyes. Marcus sighed again, shaking the tissue in his direction. “Just take it,” he bit. “Try not to bleed on the seats.”

Unwilling to provoke him, Kevin reached out with his uninjured hand and took it, pressing it softly to his bottom lip. 

They picked up James from his last call of the night just a few minutes down the street, and Kevin could feel his gaze burning into him from the moment he slid in beside him. He didn’t say anything, which Kevin was grateful for, even if the lack of words was born out of a somber, mutual awareness that there was no point in asking if he was okay when they both knew the answer.

As the car rolled out from the lot and onto the main streets, Kevin watched the lights from the city slowly taper off into darkness, the high-rises giving way to short brick buildings until those turned to withering houses along old back streets. Every mile, every inch that brought him closer to the house pulled Kevin further and further away from the certainty, the clarity, he’d had back at the hotel. Under the threat of what was surely to come when he walked through the door, he started to question if he had made the right choice after all. 

The thought of performing for one of Connor’s friends was revolting and felt somehow unforgivable, but at least it would have saved him from _this._ He could have been quiet, compliant, could have gotten on his knees like he was supposed to, like he had learned to do in all the worst ways. It would have been over by now. Maybe Eric was right, and Connor never would have needed to find out. Maybe he could have found a way to live with it the same way he learned to live with every other horrible, disgusting act he’d committed. Tucked it away with the rest, in the darkest part of his memory where the light didn’t reach.

The thing about regret, though, was that it didn’t do shit to erase the past. Whether he stood by his decision now or he didn’t, the damage was already done, left in a pile of broken glass and blood on a hotel carpet halfway across the city. Anxiety thrummed in his veins with the quickened pulse of blood as they turned onto the street Kevin knew too well. He told himself it had been worth it. That he had done the right thing by Connor and by himself. But all the false bravado in the world couldn’t have thawed the prison of ice that encased his heart.

His pockets were empty of the money he was owed, but Kevin, undoubtedly, would pay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> JUST... TRY TO KEEP IN MIND WHAT I SAID. DARKNESS AND DAWN AND ALL THAT. LOVE U.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one comes with another warning of some violence, and also a reminder of things getting worse before they get better. ~Trust the process~ lmao. Tysm to everyone who continues to love this story. It's been tough since going back to work to dedicate as much time to it, but I'm committed, and it honestly makes it so much easier to know there are actually people getting enjoyment out of the work I put into this. So thanks for that. Enjoy :)

The walk up the narrow strip of cracked pavement leading to the house felt like a death march. With James in front of him and Marcus in the back, Kevin felt like a trapped animal, boxed in, though he knew their physical proximity had little to do with it. There would be no running either way. 

The old, wooden porch creaked beneath their weight as they made their way up the steps. Marcus pushed between them to slide his key into the lock, and James reached a hand wordlessly over to his, giving Kevin a comforting squeeze between them. Kevin squeezed back with cold, trembling fingers, but he couldn’t bring himself to look up. He didn’t want James to see the naked terror in his eyes. Their hands fell apart as the lock gave way and Marcus pushed the door open. Kevin was the last to file in this time, hugging his arms around his stomach. 

The General was stationed where he usually was when they arrived home from a late call, awaiting them in the tall-backed armchair in front of the fireplace, like a king on his throne, ready to hear the plea of his subjects; ready to shell out a ruling of their worthiness, whether they would be spared or they would suffer. Kevin avoided his eyes from the moment he stepped inside, the door closing behind him like iron bars slamming shut on a cell. 

They waited silently — all three of them — as the General finished up his phone call, barking a few words in a language Kevin hadn’t quite been able to decipher in all his time with him. Whatever transpired on the call clearly did not make for a pleasant chat. Already, Kevin was at a disadvantage, going into this interaction fresh off a bad mood.

Finally, he ended his call with another harsh word to whoever was on the receiving end, then turned his attention to them. In a wordless command, he gestured with a lazy curl of his hand to come forward. James must have sensed the way Kevin’s body seized up at the direction, sparing him by being the first to take a step forward. He crossed the room in long, anxious strides, coming to a stop in front of the chair. Without looking up, Kevin heard the whispered rustle of money changing hands, the brush of bills counted one by one. 

“I see our friend Mr. Kruschev is still quite the big tipper,” the General remarked with a low chuckle, folding the wad of cash and tucking it into a clip. “You must be doing something right.”

Kevin didn’t look up at the slap of skin against denim, but he could practically taste the retort that James was biting behind his teeth, tension and anger radiating from his body. He held it back. James had been there long enough to know better than to talk back, and yet, not long enough to have given up caring about the consequences. 

“You’re up, princess.” The slick oil of the General’s smile slithered down Kevin’s spine, even with his eyes glued to the floorboards. He hated when he called him that. He swallowed back a dual surge of terror and disgust, curling his fists at his sides. He didn’t move, nor did he say anything. In fact, his body seemed to have locked up entirely in the face of the very real consequences of his actions. 

And yet, somehow, all trace of regret he had felt leading up to his arrival was gone, dissipated in exchange for something else, something unidentifiable that burned slow and steady beneath his skin like a fire. 

Kevin could feel the shift in mood from across the room. The sharp gleam of irritation could have sliced him open. It didn’t take much to bait the General into aggression, especially when it came to a show of defiance. Especially when it offered an opportunity to inflict punishment. Especially when it came to Kevin. 

“Surely, I don’t need to repeat myself.” His voice was lower that time, a threat laced into every syllable. After another beat of defiant silence, Kevin jumped at the scrape of the wood on wood, the chair kicking back as the General shot up to his full standing height. Kevin felt himself shrink inward on himself either further. “Get over here.”

“I don’t have the money,” Kevin murmured, the words but a brush of a whisper on barely-moving lips. 

The General took a step forward, then another, stopping with his boots set apart several feet in front of where Kevin stood. “What was that?”

A deep breath flooded his lungs like cold, rushing water as his head snapped up, looking him in the eye. “I said, I don’t have your _fucking_ money.”

Everything went still. The room was deathly quiet save for the groan of a floorboard shifting under James’s weight to his left. “Kevin,” he heard him say softly, but the General shot one palm up in his direction, silencing him in place. 

The scowl on his lips curled upward into a chilling grin. “No, let’s let him say what he wants to say,” he said, sauntering the few steps that stood between them. “Clearly he’s feeling brave.”

He hated himself for it, but Kevin could feel himself losing nerve already, the burst of anger and adrenaline dissolving under the knowledge of what came next. He’d lived it before a dozen times over the course of a year, taking the brunt of his anger under far worse circumstances. There was nothing he could have done in those other instances— the times when men had taken what they came for without paying and Kevin was the one who had to answer for their cruelty. This time was his own fault. He had made the choice to run, and now he would face the consequences.

“Go on, then,” the General baited, gesturing his arm to the room around them. “We’re all waiting to hear what explanation you have for why you’ve decided you no longer have to pull your weight around here.”

Kevin clamped his jaw shut, feeling the grind of his molars vibrating his gums. He flinched at the sudden bark of laughter, inches from his face. 

“What? Nothing to say now?” the General smiled, and Kevin could smell the hint of whiskey on his breath, just as Eric had hours earlier. Two devils in the same nightmare. “You were so chatty just a moment ago.”

When Kevin didn’t take his bait, a strong hand gripped onto his chin, fingers digging into muscle and bone with bruising force. He only had to look the General in the eye for half a second before his head was jerked to the side, forced to look where James stood beside the staircase, hands hovering helplessly at his sides, Marcus beside him with his eyes trained passively on the floor. 

“I’m sure your friend James would love to know why you think you can walk around here freeloading while he has to earn his keep.”

“I—” James opened his mouth, then closed it, eyeing them nervously. But Kevin cut him off before he had to scramble for any more of a response. 

“I didn’t ask to be here,” Kevin spat, trying and failing to jerk out of the man’s grasp. He saw James’s eyes widen slightly, surely at whatever audacity had found its way into Kevin’s nerve, but he hadn’t been able to stop himself. “Neither did he.”

The General turned his head back to face him, squeezing so tightly to his jaw he was afraid it would dislocate if he so much as twitched in his grasp. He studied him for a moment with the all-too familiar leer he seemed to wear at all times, before roughly shoving Kevin away. He stumbled a few steps before gaining his balance, looking up at him hesitantly as he cradled his aching jaw. 

“There’s the fucking door,” the Geneal sneered coldly, pointing directly behind where Kevin hunched. 

Just like that, Kevin’s resistance fell limp and lifeless somewhere inside him, dying behind his eyes. They both knew he wasn’t walking out that door, and they both knew why. He stood up to his full height again, but kept his gaze lowered to the floor, unable to look him in the eye when he accepted defeat. 

“What are you waiting for?” The smile was evident in his voice. The General knew he had won the fight before it began. “Aren’t you going to leave?”

Behind his eyelids, the once crystal-clear image of his little sister’s face appeared in broken fragments of what his memory could piece together after all this time apart; brown eyes, like their mother’s; the fishtail braid she wore over one shoulder for months on end because she had been so excited to learn how to do it from a friend at school. The picture was fuzzy at the edges, the lines of her contour erased and rewritten by the trauma that piled on so heavy he couldn’t help but crack underneath the weight, by the pills that scrubbed a little piece of his mind away forever every time he swallowed them. But he could see her there, still, at thirteen years old, ten, eight, seven, five. Holding onto his hand with both of hers on a slippery ice rink. Looking up at him like he was her hero, sent there only to keep her steady and not let her fall. 

He could see Jack, too; a spitting image of his own reflection, back when his reflection wasn’t a lifeless string of skin and bones, all sharp edges and dark circles and bruises that never had enough time to fade before new ones layered over them like a stained glass mosaic of his own personal horrors. He would be stronger than Kevin now, surely, and once upon a time that would have elated his brother to no end. Probably not now. Kevin hoped he was strong. Hoped he would stay that way forever, just the way Kevin remembered him.

Behind their pictures in his mind was Eric, and all the men just like him. Men who hurt, men who took and took and _took,_ and who whispered cruel words against his skin, like _It isn’t up to you to say stop._

Kevin would die before he was the reason anyone would utter those words to his siblings. 

“No,” he whispered to the floorboards. “I’m not leaving.”

His moment of quiet grief, two runaway tears slapping onto the canvas of his sneakers, was flattened by the General’s voice; falsely boisterousness thinly veiling the rage that Kevin would shortly feel. 

“Well then,” his hands were a thunderclap, splitting the silence of the room down the middle, “Since you’ve decided you’ll be gracing us with your presence a little longer, you have some making up to do for the money you owe me.”

 _It’s okay,_ he tried to soothe himself with the lifeless words inside his mind. _It’s going to be okay. You’ve survived it before. You’ll survive it again. And again. And again. And—_

A swift punch to the stomach was certainly not what he was expecting right off the bat, but it was what he got, sending him crumpling down to his knees, doubled over as he gasped for breath. 

“Don’t—” He heard James’s soft footsteps move quickly toward him, but the General stepped into his path, shoving him back. 

“Marcus,” he barked. “Take him upstairs.”

“Yes, sir.”

Kevin didn’t bother trying to get up. There was only a little bit of resistance Kevin could hear as Marcus dragged his friend up the steps, James twisting out of the larger man’s grasp to snap that he could walk on his own, but Kevin didn’t watch any of it happen. He kept his head bowed, arms wrapped around his middle in anticipation of another blow. He closed his eyes and waited for the worst, hoping that it would at least be over quickly. 

Fingers in his hair jerked him upright, his neck straining at the harsh angle. All amusement in the General’s eyes was extinguished now that they were alone. He bent down far enough that flecks of his spit landed on Kevin’s cheek when he spoke. “Tell me how fucking sorry you are, and maybe you’ll be able to walk tomorrow.”

_I’m sorry._

_I’m not sorry._

_I hate you I hate you I hate you._

_“Fuck you.”_

He wasn’t sure which one of them was more shocked to hear the words bubble from his mouth, but both of them held firm; Kevin’s eyes blazing hot, the General’s chilling to the bone. It was too late to take it back, but he was equally surprised to find he didn’t really want to. Not even when a sharp backhand struck him hard enough to make his vision go momentarily white. The hand in his hair released him, sending him crashing onto his side. 

The General was on top of him before he could even attempt to push himself up, a familiar and terrible weight, crushing him into the hardwood. Kevin hadn’t fought his advances in a year, and even then — as the General never missed an opportunity to remind him — he had broken fairly quickly. But now, whatever had snapped inside of him with Eric must have been the last crack needed to shatter the dam holding back a year’s worth of rage and resentment, because his hands were on his chest, shoving and hitting and scratching at whatever he could reach. That is, until a fist knocked into the side of his head, sending blood speckling onto the wood beside him. 

When Kevin brought his hands up to his face, General took the opening to seize his wrists, gathering them in one hand and stretching them effortlessly over his head. Pinned to the floor, it was almost embarrassing how little Kevin’s physical strength matched up, but with another blinding wave of rage, he remembered that even that much was a deliberate move on the General’s part to keep him subdued. Threaten him. Drug him, starve him, beat him. Make him weak enough that, even if he ever found the will to fight back, it would be too late. 

Kevin closed his eyes, the muscles in his arms going slack as he forfeited his resistance. He let himself be maneuvered roughly onto his stomach without trying to wiggle out of his grasp. When he felt two rough hands on his waistband, he pressed his forehead into the grains of the wood and waited for it to be over. 

Then everything stopped. The hands released him, the weight on top of him settling back onto his thighs. There was a slight rustling behind him, like paper instead of the cloth he had been expecting. Kevin opened his eyes but didn’t move a muscle, terrified more, perhaps, of the unknown than he was of what he knew was going to happen. Without warning, his head was yanked up off the floor by rough fingers in his hair. He hissed in pain and had to blink a few times to focus on whatever object was being thrust under his nose. 

Then it became clear, and all the air was stolen from his lungs. 

“What. The fuck. Is this.” The General growled in his ear. 

Kevin’s eyes were already filling with tears, the small, white square of paper in front of his face going blurry once again. “No. No, no, no, no, no.”

His forehead was slammed into the floorboard without warning, and when he was pulled back up, the room was tilting on an uneven axis. But he could still see it, even then, the loopy scrawl doubling and reconverging in his fuzzy vision. _Dear Kevin._

“Did I not make myself _abundantly_ fucking clear enough to you the first time?” His head was smashed down a second time, and this time he came away with a warm trickle down his skin. “What the fuck did I say about keeping your mouth shut?”

“I’m sorry,” Kevin groaned as red spotted his vision. But he wasn’t talking to the General anymore. He was talking to Connor. And he _was_ sorry, for being so careless. So stupid. For putting him in danger once again. When his head hit the floor for a third time, he stayed down, the hand in his hair pressing him down into the wood. The General was quiet for a moment, which was quite possibly more frightening than when he was talking. Kevin tried to turn his head to see what he was doing, but his face was shoved back down as soon as he moved. 

“You fucking will be,” the General suddenly grumbled, pushing off of his neck to stand. His loud, thumping boots vibrated the floor under Kevin’s ear as he crossed the room in several long strides, disappearing behind the wall of the kitchen. 

Kevin tried to listen in to the sound of rummaging from the other room, but his brain was already acting like an old-timey radio, tuning in and out of his surroundings from the blows to his head. He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again, the General was approaching again, dropping to one knee beside him with something in his hand. Something thin and black, something—

_No._

The phantom sting of hard plastic cut into his wrist as he eyed the zip ties in the General’s hand, an instinctive panic kicking his body awake at the horrible memories and the new threat. But before he could so much as roll over, his arms were jerked behind his back, wrists pinned together in one large hand. He cried out from the sharp stab of pain in his shoulders. A heavy knee on his spine momentarily pushed the air from his lungs and by the time he could breathe again, he was completely immobilized. He let out a frustrated sob as he pulled at his restraints.

Another vibration of wood against his cheek drew his eyes to the base of the staircase where Marcus stood, frozen mid-step with one hand braced on the railing. Kevin barely had time to process the uneasy, tight-lipped expression he wore from his lopsided angle on the floor before he was being roughly hauled to his feet, the muscles and joints in his shoulders crying out against the strain. 

“Move.” 

He stumbled forward at the General’s prompting, a solid hand wrapped nearly all the way around his bicep. The General hadn’t restrained him like this since the inaugural week of nightmares he’d endured in the basement. The thought cut his breathing short in his throat as he was shoved through the threshold of the kitchen, closer and closer to the… no. No, no, no, no, _no, please._

“W-wait,” he tried, digging his heels into the kitchen linoleum to try and gain some traction. The General dragged him effortlessly forward anyway. “What are you—? No!”

“Shut up.” 

The heavy metal latch that hooked over the doorknob clattered against the wall as the General released it, pulling open the thick, wooden door to the basement. Kevin nearly tumbled down as he was shoved onto the first step, caught only by a rough yank that sent a sickening crackle of pain down his arm. 

“I’m sorry,” tried again, sincerity easier to fake with the rising panic. “I’m sorry, please, don’t… don’t do this.” He wasn’t even sure what he was begging for at this point, but he knew that nothing good ever happened below the surface of this house, and he wasn’t eager to find out what was in store for him this time.

The damp must of cement and rotted wood wafted up to meet him, filling his mind with needless reminders of the horrors he’d seen inside these walls. He could feel the room getting smaller, tighter around him as they neared the bottom of the staircase, his body physically cementing him in place as he seized up from the fear. With only a couple of steps to go, the General grew impatient of his uncooperative legs and gave him a sharp kick to the back of the knee, sending him crashing down. Without his arms free to catch himself, all he could do was strain his neck in an attempt not to let his head take yet another blow, instead letting his already-aching shoulder take the brunt of the fall. 

Dust scurried up around his face as his cheek met cold concrete and he coughed it out of his mouth, sending a sharp spike of pain through his ribs. When he dared to crack his eyelids, he found that the General hadn’t even left the steps. He was staring down at him with a look of contempt, his phone held up horizontally. Kevin closed his eyes against the sudden camera flash in the darkness, a lightning bolt of pain cutting through his throbbing head. 

“You hate being here so fucking much?” the General taunted down at him. “Let’s see how you fare being someone else’s problem.”

He retreated back up the staircase, the familiar sound of creaking wood stirring up all kinds of vile memories he would have liked to have kept repressed. In the silence of the basement, the weight of the night bore down on him fully all at once; the shock of seeing Eric in that room, the multiple assaults he’d endured in only a few short hours, the risky phone call he’d made in the overpriced hotel business center. 

The realization that the General now had access to Connor’s name and phone number and, by association of those things, a lot more. 

And now he was… he didn’t even know what. 

The faint rustle of movement from behind him startled a whimper from Kevin’s throat, his whole body tensing. With an amount of strength he frankly didn’t think he had left, he turned over onto his side, expecting to see one of the rodent creatures he used to hear scurrying in the walls. Instead, he found a small, half-dressed, blonde-haired boy staring back at him from the mattress — one he’d hoped to never see again — in the corner of the basement. 

_Chris._

His knees were drawn up to his chest, a matching set of zip-ties securing the arms he had wrapped around them together. The skin around his eyes was discolored and pale, a patch of dried blood chipping around his nose. 

A few pieces of information clicked into place at once. 

_“Chris is gone tomorrow.”_

_“A falsified passport.”_

_“Let’s see how you fare being someone else’s problem.”_

In the basement that held the worst of his worst memories, under the curious, watchful eyes of a stranger, darkness finally closed in around the edges and Kevin slipped below its surface.

* * *

The week leading up to Christmas was the worst of Connor’s life. Not a minute went by where Kevin did not consume his thoughts, sleeping and awake. Twice, he had called in sick for his shifts at the diner, until he got an email with his credit card bill from the last hotel he had rented — prompting another round of tears — and decided he couldn’t really afford to skip any more paydays. This behavior raised an eyebrow from his mother, who had watched him pick up hours relentlessly for the past two months, but he could hardly even bring himself to put up much of a facade for her. She was worried about him, and he felt bad for it, but not bad enough to stop him from locking himself away in his room every moment he wasn’t at work. 

He was barely functioning. What made it worse was that he had no one to talk to. No one to help carry the immeasurable weight that hung on his shoulders. It wasn’t even the lack of options that hindered him, though he certainly wouldn’t have chosen Steve nor Eric to confide in about this. But even his parents, his mother, who he trusted more than almost anyone else in the world, couldn’t know. If she did, she would undoubtedly make him go to the police. Which, arguably, he should have done from the beginning. Maybe she would be the push he needed to do the right thing. The temptation was there. Every day, he came a little bit closer to breaking. He would stand there with his trembling hand on the doorknob of his bedroom, listening to the sound of utensils scraping in the kitchen, telling himself that she was _right there,_ that he could walk out there and break the dam, let everything that beat against the walls of his chest pour out of him like it so badly wanted to. Probably, she wouldn’t have the perfect solution for something like this, if such a thing even existed, but she was his mother, and maybe, at least, she knew more than him. 

Because Connor couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t stand knowing what he knew, and he really couldn’t stand keeping quiet about it. For as long as he lived, he would never, ever forgive himself if his negligence and cowardice was the reason Kevin… 

He couldn’t even think about it.

 _If you value his life at all,_ the warning message had said. 

He did. Connor valued Kevin’s life more than he had ever thought his heart capable of cherishing anything. Whoever sent the message must have known that, or at least expected it, because it was exactly the perfect leverage to use against him. How could he possibly risk trying to pursue Kevin again if he thought for a _moment_ there was a chance it could hurt him? 

He didn’t understand how they would know it was him, if he tried; Connor was always as careful as he could be when he created his fake profiles to meet up with Kevin. But then there was a lot Connor didn’t know about this operation. Only what little Kevin had confided in him, which essentially amounted to the knowledge that these people had power and reach that extended beyond his own comprehension. 

He couldn’t chance it. He couldn’t live with doing nothing, either. Instead, he was stuck in this miserable in-between while he was forced to go about his life, just going through the motions, his sanity fraying at both ends. His performance was suffering at work, which he might have given a shit about if it was anything more pressing than delivering plates to tables, but getting screamed at by customers over a side of Ranch dressing was doing no favors for his mental health. 

“I want this meal taken off the bill,” a gruff middle-aged man barked at him on Friday evening, ten hours into a double shift. Connor could practically feel his eye twitching. 

“Sorry,” he gritted through a clenched jaw, far past the pleasantries of a forced smile at this point. “I can bring you a new side.”

“No, I said I want it _comp’d,”_ the man replied, speaking slowly as if Connor was too dense to comprehend it the first time. “My food will be cold by the time you get back.”

 _It’s a fucking salad, dipshit, it was served cold,_ Connor wanted to — but very much did not — respond. He was in no mood to enter the losing battle of arguing with a customer. 

“I’ll get my manager.” He snapped his mouth shut and turned on his heel, stalking off toward the kitchen, but not before the customer made sure to make a remark about how stupid the waitstaff must be, just loud enough to be within earshot. 

The stainless steel countertop rattled as he slammed down an industrial-sized tub of Hidden Valley, popping off the lid. His phone buzzed in the front pocket of his apron, but he didn’t bother reaching to check it. Kimbe was about the coolest manager he could ask for, but she was a stickler for using phones on the clock, and he would rather not be yelled at by two people at once. Besides, it was probably just his mom calling to check up on him, as she did with increasing frequency as he slipped deeper into his depression. As he poured a dollop of dressing into the side cup, he made a mental note to shoot her a text on his break.

“Kimbe,” he made his way to the corner of the kitchen where she was helping one of the new hires roll silverware. “Table thirty wants a free meal. Says the food is cold.”

She turned to glance out the square panel of glass on the kitchen door without pausing in her work. “It’s a fucking salad,” she deadpanned. 

“I’m aware.”

Letting out an exaggerated breath, she placed down the roll over silverware in her hand and turned to him. “For the little darling, I presume?” she asked, gesturing at the cup of Ranch.

“Yep.”

“Great,” she said flatly, taking it from his hand. “I’ll take care of it. You look…” she paused as her eyes scanned over his appearance, apparently looking for some nice way to phrase what she was trying to say before giving up. “Terrible?”

“Thanks,” Connor replied in equal monotone. 

Kimbe offered him a sympathetic smile, swatting him with a cloth napkin before she stuffed it down her pocket. “Go take your fifteen, kid. I’ll finish him up and grab the tip for you.”

“Don’t worry,” Connor said, already untying his apron from around his waist. “There won’t be one.”

The air outside was way too cold to be hanging around in his short sleeve button-up, but he didn’t care. He needed to be out of that building, to breathe in something close to fresh air. He sank down onto the overturned bucket that the smokers used for furniture on their breaks. Maybe he should take up smoking, too. If for nothing else, then to have more excuses to step out of the diner. 

It felt way too good to sit down for what had to be the first time in ten hours, his knees and low back throbbing as he released the tension in his muscles. He allowed himself a moment of quiet, his head thudding lightly back against the dirty brick wall behind him, eyes slipping shut. The exhaustion collided into him now that he had a moment to sit still, the lack of sleep and long hours bearing their full weight on his shoulders. He probably could have fallen asleep just like that, sitting on a bucket behind a stripmall diner in the freezing cold. He might have, if it weren’t for his phone buzzing once more in his pocket. 

Connor sat up and pulled it from his front pocket, prepared to send his mother back an obligatory “I’m fine” message for the third time this week, but he blinked in surprise when his screen lit up with the missed notifications. 

One missed call, followed by a voicemail. Both from what his caller ID told him was the Marriott in Downtown Chicago.

He pulled his eyebrows together, doing a mental recount of all the hotels he and Kevin had stayed at over the past couple of months, and was quite confident he had never been able to afford that one, so it couldn’t be someone calling about a prior bill. He tapped a cold thumb over the screen, opening up the voicemail and pressing play. 

The moment he pressed the phone to his ear, his blood gave way to the chill outside, freezing him from the inside out. 

“Hey. Um... Connor? It’s me. Kevin.” His voice was crystal clear, unmistakable on the other end. “Sorry to call out of nowhere. I know you’re probably working or… I don’t know. I’m sorry. I don’t have long, but I…” There was a pause in which Connor could practically hear him swallowing from the other side. “It’s Friday,” he said, finally, “and I needed to call you.” 

Connor was already crying. 

“To say...” The next pause was even longer. Connor could picture his face so clearly in that moment, his eyes pinched shut, the familiar crease forming between his brows that he got when he was concentrating hard on one of Connor’s math problems. “You gave me your phone number a couple weeks ago so that I could call you if I ever changed my mind. I hope you won’t be angry that I’m calling you for something that… isn’t that.”

Connor pulled in a lungful of cold air, anxiety knotting up his insides as he continued to speak. 

“I’m sorry that things ended the way they did last week. I never… _never_ wanted you to get anywhere near that part of my life. I hate that you did. I’m just glad you weren’t hurt. I could never…” There was another pause, followed by a sharp exhale of breath that sounded suspiciously a lot like a coverup for a sob. Connor pressed the phone closer to his ear. “I’m not making a lot of sense, I’m sorry. And I can’t… I can’t talk for much longer, but I just. I had to call you and tell you…”

There was no mistaking the next sound, nor the series of the same ones that followed, for anything other than the heart-wrenching cries that they were. Connor waited.

“...to tell you that I meant what I said the first time we met. That I can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to be your friend. And I feel… despite everything, I feel so, so fucking lucky that I got to be that. Even if it was just for a little while.” Connor pressed a hand to his mouth, muffling his own sob that escaped in a whirl of breathy fog around his fingers. “Because I also meant what I said when I told you you’re the best friend I’ve ever had. You are, and… you’re so much more than that to me.

“You’ve made these past couple months something better than I ever thought I would have again.” Kevin’s voice trembled when he spoke, making Connor’s throat burn at the sound. “And even if that last night I spent with you, at the park and in your car and…” He let out a shaky breath. “Even if that was the last good night I ever have, it was worth it. It was all worth it to know you. I don’t want you to ever think I regret a second of it. Because I don’t.”

The tears that slipped down Connor’s face were cold as soon as they hit the air, but he couldn’t even move to wipe them away. _I don’t regret it either,_ he wanted to shout back through the phone, loud enough that Kevin could hear him wherever he was now.

“I told you, once, that I didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye to you again, like I did the first night. So I’m holding to that, now. I can’t let the time at the diner be the last you heard from me. So here I am.”

“No,” Connor whispered, his head shaking back and forth, though there was no one but the cold brick wall to hear his plea. 

“You’re going to get everything you always dreamed about. You’re too good not to. You’re going to be… _incredible_ in New York, Connor. I know you are. Shit. _Shit,_ hey, I— I have to go now. Okay? I have to... I have to go. But I. I have to tell you first. What I should have told you in the car. Or in the diner. Or one of our motel rooms, or… anywhere would have been better than here, because I’ve… I’ve known it for a while. But this is all we have now.”

His heart was racing so fast in his chest, but no amount of his traitorous anxiety could have prepared him to hear the words out loud.

“I love you, Connor.” His voice was a crackling whisper through the earpiece of the phone, shattering Connor even from across the plane of time and space that separated them now. “That’s… that’s what I wanted to call and tell you. That I love you. And I...”

The final pause drew out between them like a thread pulling taut, tension building all the way to the snap.

“Yeah. That’s what I wanted to say.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Damn. That feel when you only had the nerve to drop the "L" word when ur partner was asleep and then ur partner only gets to drop the "L" word on a voicemail with no return phone number? Sucks, man. Men talk about your feelings challenge 2021. 
> 
> Okay but for real pls don't hate me. 
> 
> The reason this chapter took a little longer to post was because I wanted to make sure 12 was fully fleshed out before I posted 11, and like... to put it lightly, 12 is a bit of a monster chapter. So be prepared for a #journey next time around. Until then, thank u all for your kind words and encouragement and general enthusiasm. You all make my day.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well... fuckin' here it is. Behold, the monster chapter that has plagued my existence for far too long and is now your problem. Thanks as always for all the love. Enjoy.

The annual pre-Christmas get-together at the Blade residence had truly never been further down on Connor’s list of ideal ways to spend a Saturday night. 

The night before had been spent in sleepless agony, a never ending loop of the same voicemail played over and over until the words became a shapeless mash of syllables in his overtired brain. There were a million questions the phone call raised, but also an implicit answer to the one Connor had been losing his mind over for an entire week:

Kevin was alive. 

He was alive, and he was… well, he wasn’t okay, because he had called from a hotel, which could have only meant he was doing one thing. It wasn’t a detail of his reality Connor liked to linger on, even before, but it was twice as gutting when he could no longer offer him any means of comfort. Their Friday night escapism had never been enough – _could_ never be enough – to outweigh everything else Kevin was enduring, but at least it was _something._ And now Kevin was out there alone, and there was nothing Connor could do, and he had missed the one opportunity he had at direct contact by ignoring his buzzing phone while he poured a plastic cup full of Ranch fucking dressing. 

That debilitating bit of information is what left him curled on his side under his covers, still in his work uniform, long after the afternoon sun had lit his room through the cracked blinds. 

The note Kevin had written him the morning after their first meeting was nearly unreadable now, the ink smudged with days worth of tears, dried and rewetted, wrinkled between his hands. But he held it close anyway, because it was all he had left of Kevin that he could physically touch. That, and the maroon hoodie he had come to think of as his after he borrowed it so many times, which was curled in a ball and pressed to his chest. The ghost of his scent still lingered from their last night together. Between that and his voice on the tinny speaker of his phone, he could almost pretend he was right there beside him. 

Connor didn’t respond when his mother knocked on the door a little after 4 p.m., but he wasn’t surprised when he heard the creak of the door anyway.

“Hey, sweetheart,” she said, her voice soft and laced with concern. “We’re leaving for the Blades’s in an hour. Will you be ready?”

Connor’s eyes fell shut. He honestly didn’t know how he could possibly make it through an entire evening with Steve and Eric in the state he was in. In addition to their usual obnoxious presence, there would be the mocking reminder that they were the ones to bring Kevin into his life in the first place, even if the whole thing had been nothing more than a one-off prank to them; something they never had to bother thinking about again. 

“I don’t feel good,” Connor muttered, still facing the wall with his back curled away from her. “I should probably stay home.”

The long exhale behind him wasn’t necessarily one of impatience, but he tensed anyway, prepared for pushback. 

“Connor.” He was right. “This isn’t healthy. What’s going on with you?”

“Nothing’s going on, Mom.” He pressed his face into the pillow. “I just don’t feel good.”

“For a week?” she questioned. “You’ve hardly gotten out of bed.”

“I’ve gone to work,” he argued weakly. 

“I can see that,” she said. “You’re still in your uniform.” 

He let out a long breath. She had him there. Before he could respond, she stepped further into his room, cracking the door closed behind her. 

“Honey,” she spoke gently. “I’m worried about you. You haven’t been like this since… before.”

_Before._ Connor winced. That was certainly one way to label the period of time in his early teens when his internal battle of religion vs. violently-repressed-sexuality reached a head, manifesting itself in one of the deepest depressive episodes of his life. To this day, he suspected that it was the severity of his condition during that time that led his mother to be as tolerant as she was when he finally came out to her. Apparently seeing him like that had scared her enough to soften her heart and made her aware that her options very well might have been having a gay son or a dead one. And she was a good person, and a good mother, which is why Connor couldn’t stand the thought of scaring her like that again. 

With a groan, he pushed himself up into a sitting position, the absolute carnage of his physical appearance doing little to support the case that he was “fine.”

“Will it make you feel better if I come to dinner?” he asked. 

The smallest smile broke out on her lips, though the worry lines around her eyes stayed prominent as ever. Connor feared a part of her would always look at him with some degree of helpless concern. “That’s all I’m asking.”

He tried his best to return the smile, but even he knew the attempt fell short.

* * *

Awareness came back to Kevin in the form of unforgiving concrete under his cheek. He knew where he was before he even opened his eyes, the realization slipping through him like the coldness from the ground permeating his skin. The sound of stirring reminded him that he wasn’t alone, and he forced his eyelids open anyway, blinking until the wavering images in his vision converged into one. 

The smaller boy – _Chris_ – was watching him, a bit warily, from the corner. 

“Are you okay?” He asked from across the darkness, though he made no move to approach Kevin’s strewn out body. A stray lock of filthy blonde hair hung over one eye, but Kevin caught a small reflection in the other from the small strip of light that came in from the crack beneath the kitchen door. 

Kevin blew out a weak puff of air through his nose, stirring up some of the dust beneath his cheek. One hell of a question with a rather obvious answer, he thought. 

“Been better,” he muttered, wishing he could have his hands back, if only to wipe away the streams of moisture on his cheeks. In the cold of the basement, they froze his skin like ice.

He gave half a second of consideration to trying to sit up, but one tug against the sharp plastic that bound his arms behind him was enough to send a violent shockwave of panic through his body. Besides the physical pain, Kevin was incredibly claustrophobic. The General knew that. The utter immobility, the way his hands were locked uselessly behind him, limiting his movement, made his skin crawl with an anxiety that would drag him into pure hell if he let it. He pinched his eyes shut and pressed his temple harder into the floor beneath him, willing the cold to keep him grounded, trying so hard not to think about the familiar way his fingertips were already starting to lose sensation. 

“Are you Kevin?” His eyes opened at the tentative voice, finding Chris still huddled against the wall. 

He swallowed against the dryness in his throat, managing a small nod against the floor. “Yeah,” he said weakly. 

“James talks about you.”

At this, Kevin couldn’t help but smile, just a little, even as his eyes welled with renewed tears at the thought of his friend and the likelihood of being separated from him forever. He didn’t know how he had any hope of surviving this hellish existence without James beside him. 

“Yeah. You, too,” Kevin whispered. “It’s Chris, right?”

Chris nodded, mirroring the tug at the corner of his mouth. But it disappeared as soon as it came, his face falling back into the same exhausted expression. Now that Kevin took the time to really look at him, he could see the deep etching of the trauma he had undoubtedly endured in his time down here. James had been right about his stubbornness– he kept up a strong facade of being more okay than he possibly could have been. But his clothing had been reduced to a pair of briefs and a filthy t-shirt, both of which, along with his skin, were littered with patches of blood and lacerations. From across the room, Kevin could tell that a constant stream of shivering wracked his small body from what was surely more than the cold. 

“What did you do to make him so angry?” Chris asked after a moment.

Kevin snorted out another breath of bitter laughter. “Like he needs a reason.”

“It seemed like a pretty serious offense.”

“It wasn’t.” Kevin snapped, suddenly defensive. He knew it wasn’t Chris’s fault, that he hadn’t done anything, but his words sparked a burn of resentment. Because he was wrong; there hadn’t been any serious offense. The General _didn’t_ need a reason to be cruel to him, but even if he did, Kevin hadn’t done anything to deserve his anger.

He had been so scared to accept Connor’s kindness from the very beginning. Terrified, because on some level, he always knew the consequences of being treated like anything other than what the General allowed him to be. In the General’s eyes, the existence of Connor was a loose end; a threat to the airtight cover he had managed to maintain for god-only-knew how long. 

Maybe he had been right about just that one thing. Maybe Connor was a threat, but only in the way that he changed something in Kevin. His presence in Kevin’s life, his friendship, his kindness, had cracked through the shell that Kevin thought was all that was left of him, and accessed the soft flesh of the person that was hiding away inside him all this time. The scared, submissive Kevin of only a few months ago – the one that the General had carefully, intentionally molded out of months of torture and manipulation – never would have had the guts to push Eric away from him in the hotel room. He never would have claimed enough autonomy to feel like he _could._ It wasn’t even until Kevin heard the sharp, clear “no” in his own voice tonight, that he realized, somewhere along the line, he had gotten that ability back. And it was Connor who helped him do that, probably without even realizing it. 

Even now, up against the new circumstances that stood before him, daunting and paralyzing as ever, Kevin wouldn’t have changed that. He wouldn’t ever be able to regret knowing Connor for the short time that he had, nor the ways that knowing him had changed his whole person. If he was to die like this, he was glad he could do so having earned back a shred of his humanity.

Kevin tried again to sit up, ignoring the flutter of anxiety at the increased feeling of restriction, but the sharp stab of pain through his body stopped him. He let out a groan of frustration and laid his head back against the concrete, pinching his eyes shut. 

“Can I help you sit up?” Chris’s voice was smaller when he spoke again, perhaps his way of apologizing. Kevin cringed at both the prospect of another stranger’s hands on him and the inherent helplessness of not even being able to sit up on his own. Still, he was in no position to be turning down help. He nodded.

It seemed to require more effort than it should have for Chris to fold himself onto his knees and shuffle over to where Kevin lay. He remembered it well, the starvation, the constant pain, the repeated assaults and isolation he had endured during his own week of hell in the basement. 

“Here,” Chris spoke softly, gripping two small hands around Kevin’s biceps. Kevin met his efforts halfway, straining his muscles as he pushed his body upward, eventually landing in an upright position, a wave of dizziness crashing over him. “Do you want to sit on the mattress?”

Kevin didn’t even look in its direction. His answer was immediate. “No,” he said, swallowing back his disgust at the memories the thought provoked. “I’m fine.”

Chris seemed to understand. He didn’t argue as he made his own way back to the bed, giving Kevin some space. But instead of settling back against the corner, Kevin watched him digging for something between the mattress and the wall. “I can probably get you out of those,” he tossed back over his shoulder. “I haven’t been able to figure out an angle to do it for my own, but…” When he turned around, he was holding something thin and small between his fingers. He shrugged. “It’s worth a shot.”

Kevin squinted through the darkness, catching the slightest glint of light off the silvery object. “What is that?”

Chris’s mouth turned up in an imitation of a rueful grin as he crawled back to Kevin on his knees. “Turns out permanent retainers aren’t so permanent with the right motivation.” He said, like he was proud of this horrifying accomplishment. “Sorry, Dr. Dornan.”

“You ripped out your retainer?” Kevin blinked as Chris shuffled behind him. 

“Yep.”

“And you’re stashing it away like some sort of secret weapon?” He asked, wincing at the slight pressure on his wrists as Chris worked at them behind his back. “I’m not sure you fully grasp the kind of people you’re up against if you think that’s going to be of much help.”

“Well, it’s enough to do this.” 

As if on cue, Kevin felt a release of tension behind him and his wrists fell away from each other. He brought them to his chest, rubbing over the red, indented skin with a look of astonishment as Chris made his way back around. In one hand he held up the sharpened metal wires of his mangled retainer, and in the other, the unlatched zip-ties from Kevin’s hands. 

“My turn,” Chris said, holding out the makeshift tool for Kevin to take. He blinked, still trying to wrap his head around what just happened, and thought once again about James’s commentary on the boy, and how so far, it was all ringing true. 

Kevin reciprocated the favor, shoving the sharpened end of one of the wires into the latch of the plastic that bound Chris’s hands together. After a little bit of manipulation, he was able to loosen his enough to slip out of them as well. 

“Just so you know, this isn’t exactly going to thrill the General when he comes back,” Kevin warned, though he was surprised to feel something closer to apathy than fear at his own words, true as they were. “And I’m afraid your homemade prison-shank won’t do much for us then.”

Chris shrugged, settling himself back against the wall beside him, and not – Kevin noted – on the mattress again. “What the hell do we have to lose at this point?” he asked, the full extent of the boy’s wariness shining through for the first time. 

“There’s always something more he can take,” Kevin whispered. Whatever happened to him now, wherever his desperate act of rebellion landed him, he could only hope that his own punishment would be the end of it. That the General would call it even once Kevin was out of his hair in exchange for what was probably a sizable amount of money, and that he wouldn’t still go after his siblings. Or Connor. Kevin would go to his last breath bartering for that small mercy. 

“I know what he plans to do.” Chris’s voice pulled him from his thoughts. “It’s not happening. Not for me. I’m not letting myself get dragged out of the country to go be god-knows-what in god-knows-where. He’ll have to kill me first.”

“He _will.”_ Kevin leveled him with a serious gaze. “In a heartbeat, the second you cause more–”

“–more trouble than I’m worth? Yeah. I’ve heard.” Chris shot back immediately, with equal fervor. “Let him fucking kill me. I’d rather be dead than be another one of his fucking––” Finally, a tiny bit of the fire burned out as he realized himself and stopped short, wincing apologetically. Kevin tilted his gaze downward. “Sorry,” Chris amended, his voice quieter but still sharpened at the edges in defense. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”

“It’s fine.” Kevin meant it. He hardly had the space left in him to be angry right now at this boy over a remark he, in many ways, might have agreed with anyway. “I get it. Just… as long as you know.”

“I do,” Chris said. “And I’m not going without a fight.”

* * *

The Blade Residence was decked out, as always, in overly-expensive Christmas decor from the expensive side of Hobby Lobby; all warm-white string lights and glitter-drenched garland with pinecones and chemical snow lining the staircase in the main hallway as they entered the home. Nothing could have suited Connor’s mood less. 

“Look who’s here!” Mrs. Blade greeted them in the doorway, still in her kitchen apron. The perfect picture of an affluent housewife. She hugged his mother and greeted his father with an air-kiss on each cheek before turning to Connor. “Look at you!” she exclaimed. “Even taller than Stevie now.”

“Stop calling me that,” Steve shouted from the next room, around a mouthful of appetizers. “And no, he’s not. We’re the same height.”

Connor smiled as best he could and returned the warm, motherly hug she offered. “Hi, Mrs. Blade,” he murmured, suddenly glad he had found the motivation to take a shower before he came. “The house looks great.”

“So polite,” she remarked to his parents once she pulled back, as if he was not only standing right there, but also twenty-one years of age. “I always hoped some of that politeness would have rubbed off on Steven.”

“I am polite,” his voice came again, though the mouthful of food sort of negated his point. 

“Come on in.” She led the way into the living room, though they needed no direction in the house that Connor practically grew up in. The coffee table was lined with veggie trays and whatever Christmas themed finger foods had blown up on Facebook that year, along with a spread of assorted wines, including the obligatory bottle of sparkling grape juice for the McKinleys. The token Mormon family of the group. At that moment, Connor would have loved nothing more than to grab whichever bottle had the highest alcohol content and knock the whole thing back. 

Steve’s father was stationed in his recliner with a glass of red, eyes glued to whatever sports program was on their massive flatscreen. He greeted them with a raise of his glass, barely looking away from the television, and it took no longer than five seconds for Connor’s dad to join him. 

“The Davises are running a little behind. As per,” she added with the kind of co-conspiratorial smirk that only a midwestern woman could master during a gossip session. “But dinner is ready whenever they are. Please, help yourself to some appetizers in the meantime.”

Connor sank down on the couch next to where Steve was preoccupied on his phone.

“Hey,” he said by way of greeting, without looking up. 

“Hi,” Connor replied. 

He sank back into the couch, watching the scene unfold around him like it was straight out of a hallmark movie. The greying fathers watching sports and talking about their menial office jobs, the mothers clad in cashmere sweaters and polka-dotted aprons, not a hair out of place as they gushed over the recipes of the appetizers in front of them. This was the life that Connor had always known. This was the warmth of his privilege, to have and know such security and tradition even on the days like today when he resented it. Tonight, his mind was only on one person, one boy, who might have once spent his holidays in a similar manner to this one, but was undoubtedly somewhere much colder this year. 

His heart ached for him as much as it ached with the absence of him. He pictured what it might be like to have Kevin here with him someday, seated next to him on the plush cushions of the off-white couch, warm and safe in one of Connor’s fuzzy sweaters, a meal prepared on the table before him that he wouldn’t have to suffer for and fingers intertwined with his own, strong and unbruised. He wanted that for him. More than he had ever wanted anything, he wanted Kevin to be safe. If there was a god watching over this universe – which he became less and less inclined to believe the longer he knew Kevin – there would come a day where that boy got to spend a holiday with people who loved him again. And if that same god had ever loved him, maybe Connor would be among that group. 

The attention of the room turned to the entryway at the sound of jingling bells against the door. Eric Davis and his family were far too comfortable in the Blade home for such formalities as knocking. 

“Knock, knock.” Mrs. Davis entered the room in a flurry of beige fleece, shrugging out of her coat while balancing a glass casserole dish on her arm. “Sorry we’re late. Couldn’t peel this one away from the game long enough to bear the five minute car ride over.”

Trailing behind her was Mr. Davis, wearing a sheepish grin and raised hands, and behind _him_ was Eric, who– oh, Jesus Christ.

“What the hell happened to your face, dude?” Steve voiced the thoughts of everyone in the room, finally looking up from his phone.

“Steven,” Mrs. Blade barked, not-so-nonchalantly tipping her head toward their Very Mormon houseguests. “Language.”

But regardless of language or Connor’s parents’ opinions on it, Steve raised a very valid question. There was a long stretch of raised, red skin starting just below his eye socket and trailing down the side of his cheek. It looked incredibly painful. And fresh. 

Connor was sure he wasn’t imagining the brief glint of irritation in Eric’s eyes before he masked it with his signature smile, giving a casual shrug. “You should see the other guy.” He remarked.

“Okay, but seriously, was the other guy a werewolf?” Steve asked. “You look like you got mauled, dude.”

He _definitely_ wasn’t imagining the way his jaw twitched behind Eric’s smile that time. 

Mr. Davis interrupted with a clap of his large hands. “I think we’ve held dinner up long enough for everyone,” he announced, gesturing toward the kitchen. “And I, for one, am starving.”

Maybe Connor wasn’t the only one who sensed the strange tension in the room, because there was a brief, uncomfortable pause before Mrs. Blade stood, untying her apron from around her waist and rallying everyone into the dining room. The mothers led the way, followed by their husbands, whom they barely managed to scrape away from the television, followed by Steve, who was apparently still as ravenous as ever even after eating half of the appetizer table. 

And even if everything else had just been in Connor’s head, there was no room left for imagination in the look of pure hatred Eric shot him before he turned and left him standing alone in the living room.

* * *

Kevin had come to terms with the likely reality that he would never see his family again a long time ago. It had taken him a while, but eventually he was able to make himself mostly numb to it. Or– maybe that wasn’t true; there was no real way to dull the ache of something like that, but there were plenty of ways to distract himself from thinking about it long enough to let the pain slice him wide open. 

It was harder to ignore it now that the reality stood before him, no longer as a likelihood, but as an inevitability. 

There would be no coming back once his body was transported over international borders. He knew that for a fact. The rest of his life would be spent in captivity, forced to perform in one way or another for new strangers, maybe _worse_ strangers, until he was too broken to serve any purpose. If escape felt insurmountable a single state away from his home, how much more would it be an ocean away, likely in a place where he wouldn’t speak the language or have a single person that cared about him? 

Perhaps his biggest regret was that he would never have the chance to reconcile things with his parents. Even after everything that had happened, it killed him to know that he had left on bad terms. It hadn’t been his fault, but details like that hardly seemed to matter much now. He couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if he had stayed, tried to work things out, tried to convince them they were wrong about that place they wanted to send him and that there was no “fixing” to be done with him. Maybe they would have eventually listened. Or maybe not. Even then, he couldn’t imagine that a few months at a bible-thumping retreat for ‘troubled teens’ would have been worse than everything else he’d been forced to endure instead. At the time, he couldn’t have imagined any worse fate than that one, not after reading the horror stories of what happened to boys like him at those camps. He was terrified and felt like he had no other option but to run, having no idea the life he was running into. 

He wondered if they ever regretted pushing him away. If they ever _missed_ him. The General had taken great pleasure in showing him, on more than one occasion, proof that there had never been a missing persons report filed under his name, which led him to believe that maybe they were just happy to have him out of their hair after he threatened to put blemish on the Price family’s pristine name with his wayward urges. It hurt, but not nearly as bad as the idea that he would never have the chance to see things righted between them. Not now. 

He and Chris had taken to huddling for warmth against the wall, decidedly _not_ on the mattress, bare arm against bare arm, shivering together as the first hint of sunrise broke through the cracks in the plywood that covered the windows. They had slept on and off in shifts through the endless night, their heads resting on each other’s shoulders. Chris was filthy in a way that Kevin wished he couldn’t remember being after a week in the basement, but he didn’t care. Kevin was just glad, minimally, marginally, that at least this time, he wasn’t down here alone. 

It was Chris’s turn to sleep, his blonde locks falling over Kevin’s shoulder as he snored lightly. He wondered if it was louder because of what looked to be a broken-and-rebroken nose. Kevin hadn’t asked him about what kind of leverage or blackmail the General had on him to bring him here. Frankly, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. He had looked suffering dead in the face, unblinking, enough for one lifetime, and it wouldn’t do him any good to think about the specific set of shitty circumstances that led him into this hell house, nor the circumstances of all the unfortunate boys who came before him, and all the ones that would come after that Kevin would never have the chance to know. 

What mattered now was that they were here, together; two strangers forced into each other’s path to share the same nightmare. They couldn’t change the past or prevent the grim future that awaited them. All they had was this one day, one room, and the slim comfort of being led to the gallows with someone by their side. 

Kevin’s heart shot into throat at the sound of clattering metal at the top of the stairs, two dark shadows of feet beneath the door eclipsing the light from the kitchen. 

“Chris,” he whispered, nudging him awake. His bloodshot eyes sprang open as he sat up, at full attention, and Kevin gestured toward the source of the noise just as the door swung open. 

Both of them shrank back in unison, squinting against the harsh light on their dilated pupils. Then, after a moment, their collective tension melted as the figure at the top of the steps presented in the form of a tall, lanky boy with black hair. 

“James,” Kevin whispered, propelling himself forward into a kneel. James met him halfway, racing down the stairs to collapse on his knees in front of him and throw his arms around his neck. The intensity of the embrace caught him off guard, but he returned it without hesitation, his own freezing arms rising to curl around his back. Only a short beat passed before he felt the bounce of his friend’s shoulders, wracking him with sobs. 

“I’m so sorry, Kevin,” James cried into the neckline of his t-shirt. “I’m so sorry this is happening. That I can’t do an-anything to stop it.”

Kevin’s hand went to his hair, cradling the back of his head even as his own eyes burned with tears. “Shhh,” he whispered against his head. “It isn’t your fault. This is not your fault.”

When James pulled back, his eyes were rimmed with a dark pink he could make out in the beam of light spilling in from the kitchen. They were few and far between, the times Kevin had seen James cry in all their time shared together. The image was enough to chip away at the weak facade of strength he was trying to put up. James had always been able to see through it, anyway. 

“I heard him on the phone. He’s sending you, too,” James sniffled, his eyes turning then to Chris and holding out a hand for him to take. “He’s taking both of you away.”

“I told you, I’m not going anywhere.” There was that same stubborn flame of resistance flaring up in Chris’s bloodshot eyes, but there was fear, too, containing the fire around the edges. 

“You’re such a hard-headed little shit.” A small smile of endearment pulled at the corners of James’s mouth, even as his lip trembled. 

Oh. Kevin hadn’t really… he didn’t have a grasp on the relationship between the two of them beyond the knowledge that James snuck him food and water a little more often than he’d seen him do with any of the others, and that he was torn up about the prospect of him being sent away. But a few things seemed to click into place as he watched his friend shuffle over to the blonde-haired boy and raise a palm to his cheek, their foreheads touching. 

In that moment, he ached for Connor so badly. 

“You have to get out,” he heard Chris whisper from beside him. “You have to, James. Promise me you’ll find a way out of this.”

“Okay,” James nodded with tears streaming down his cheeks, but all three of them could read it for what it was: a placating response, a fantastical ending to a story they wouldn’t be around to finish. Another lie in which they could take refuge in against the harsh elements of the truth.

“I can’t stay very long. I don’t know how long he’ll be gone,” James said, and Kevin could read the way he was steeling himself for the inevitable goodbye that was coming for the three of them. “I can bring you guys some water. Try and find you something to eat.”

He was already pushing off of his knees when Kevin scrambled to follow suit, reaching for his wrist in a bolt of panic. “Wait.”

James didn’t have time to respond before Kevin pulled him into another bone-crushing hug, but he immediately reciprocated when he did, his skinny arms pulling Kevin tighter against him. 

The fear was thick in his throat and he gagged around the words he didn’t know how he could bring himself to say out loud. But he heard himself say them anyway, his head tucked into the side of James’s hair. 

“I need you to listen to me,” he whispered. “There’s a pocket in the side of my mattress, facing the wall. I need…” Kevin swallowed. “I need you to get the pills out of there and bring them down to me before the General gets back.”

The arms around him froze, James’s whole body stiffening against him. Kevin could already feel the instinctive rejection and needed to get in front of it.

“Please, James,” he begged, warm tears dripping onto the shoulder of his friend’s shirt. “I can’t… I can’t keep doing this. Not anymore. Not without you, not… knowing that I’ll never see anyone I love again.” 

The reality of his own statement rang loud and hard through his own body like the vibration of a cracked church bell, shaking him to his core. Images of his siblings, of Connor, even his parents despite everything, flashed in front of him before he could push them away. All of whom would live the rest of their lives without the chance to make things right. Without closure. Without Kevin. 

At least he’d gotten the chance to tell Connor he loved him. 

“We both know how this ends for me, eventually,” Kevin said grimly. “I’d rather it be me who does it. Now, before everything else I would have to suffer first.”

“Kevin.” When he pulled back, James’s face was wrecked with tears, anguished by the decision Kevin had placed on his shoulders. He felt guilty, of course he did, but he was terrified. Desperate. He hated himself for making his friend be the one to facilitate this process, but what choice did he have?

“Please, I–”

He didn’t have time to finish his thought, to appeal to the somber logic he knew existed within his friend who had shared so much of the same trauma, because the sound of the screen door off the kitchen slammed open then shut, turning the three boys to statues.

“Shit,” he heard Chris swear under his breath from behind them. 

All three of them stood frozen and wide-eyed as they listened to the thud of boots on linoleum, two steps inside the door before they paused. When they resumed, the steps were slow and deliberate, the sound coming closer and closer until the unmistakable silhouette of the General appeared in the doorway at the top of the stairs, casting an ominous shadow over them. James’s hand was still cupped around Kevin’s elbow, and he could feel his fingers trembling as they dug into his flesh. 

“Well.” His booming voice came from the doorway, a smile curling into his expression. “Isn’t this a party?”

* * *

The sound of scraping silverware on ceramic murmured over the luxurious dining room table. As luck would have it, Connor found himself planted in the chair directly across from Eric, where he could feel ugly burn of his sneer every few seconds. Connor kept his eyes down for the most part, watching the piece of roasted potato he was pushing around on his plate. He didn’t know what was happening, but he seemed to be the only person in the room who picked up on the steeping tension between the two of them. Conversation about school and sports and girlfriends droned on from beside them, but there seemed to be a much more pressing – though infinitely more confusing – silent conversation happening at their end of the table. 

Connor hadn’t seen Eric since their puzzling run-in at the ice rink, and so much had happened in the short time since then, he’d all but forgotten about it. But now, under another, much heavier unreadable stare, he was reminded of the way he had looked at him then. The way he had looked at _both_ of them. Kevin had mostly brushed it off when Connor pointed out the strangeness of the interaction, but he knew in the moment they had both shared the same fear: that Eric knew more than he was letting on. 

He nearly choked on a bite of dry chicken as a thought occurred to him; that maybe Eric had remembered Kevin after all, and he wasn’t quite sure _what,_ exactly, Eric would do with that information, but he knew that he didn’t like the idea of him having it in his artillery. There were certainly a number of ways he could weaponize his out-of-context knowledge of Connor skipping town to hang out with the prostitute he had once hired for him, none of which he was particularly fond of transpiring at a dining room table full of his family friends.

Even if all of that was the case, it still didn’t explain the open contempt for Connor that was coming off of him in waves. There was definitely a piece of the puzzle he was missing here, and he wasn’t exactly thrilled to find out.

“So, Connor,” Mrs. Blade’s voice pulled him to attention from the opposite end of the table. “Do you have any plans for the Fall? DuPage is only a two year program, right?”

Connor bit his cheek to keep the corner of his mouth from turning down. He could hear the implicit comment between her words: _You’ll be going to a real college after this, right?_ In wealthy families like this one, Community College had always been a dirty word. 

“Nothing solid yet,” he responded as politely as he could manage. “I’ve started applying to a few places. My top choices.” He paused, sparing a sideways glance at his parents who seemed to have stiffened slightly at the turn of conversation. He was well aware his future plans were a point of contention between the three of them and would rather not have that conversation here. “But, you know, those are aiming a little high, so I probably won’t get in, anyway.”

“Why not? Now that you’ve got that tutorer of yours, it should be no problem.”

Everyone turned to face Eric, who hadn’t spoken once throughout the whole dinner thus far. Everyone except Connor who froze, turned away, his eyes widening slightly. 

“You didn’t mention getting a tutorer, sweetheart.” His mother’s voice made him blink out of his momentary lapse in thought. 

“Oh. I, uh.” He swallowed, blinked again. “Yeah, it wasn’t a big deal, really. Just for one class. You know me and math.”

“You sure math is all he taught you?” 

When he finally turned to Eric, he was wearing the hint of a smirk, though the flare of genuine anger hadn’t entirely left his eyes. Connor narrowed his gaze, unsure of what the hell his problem was, but not at all comfortable with the very public way it was starting to manifest itself. 

“Pretty sure,” Connor shot back tightly. 

By now, there was no way the rest of the family wasn’t feeling the heat of whatever was simmering beneath the surface, though they had to be even more lost than Connor was. And thank god for the Midwestern mother’s art for polite forced conversation, because Mrs. Blade stepped in to save the table from the raging awkwardness they had slipped into. 

“Well,” she declared loudly, raising her wine glass in Connor’s direction. “I think it’s great that you’re trying to better yourself. There’s no shame in asking for help.”

Okay, sure, there was probably a less condescending way she could have phrased that, but at least it managed to get the conversation back on track, or better yet, divert the focus away from Connor’s life entirely. 

But even as the idle chatter moved on around them, breaking off into sub-conversations between the moms and the dads and Steve somewhere in the mix, the silent exchange between him and Eric only seemed to grow hotter and hotter, nearing a boiling point that Connor didn’t know how to predict. He said nothing, unwilling to provoke a confrontation when he was so clearly looking for one. If there was anything Connor simply did not have the mental fortitude for right then, it was that. 

Dinner was almost finished, and Connor had managed to spend most of his time concocting some story that would get him out of dessert and allow him to slip out of the party early and into his own bed, when Steve spoke up through another mouthful of food. 

“So, okay for real, are you not going to tell us how you got that absolute battle wound on your face?”

Eric’s spine drew up across from Connor, his shoulders rolling back into a tense posture. 

“It’s really not as exciting as you want to think it is,” Eric replied through a tight, falsely-wry smile. He was lying. Why was he lying? What was he hiding? 

“Then spill it, Davis.” 

Connor watched as his jaw twitched again, just like how it did at his earlier questioning, the darkness flashing back over his eyes. 

“Wasn’t a big deal,” he finally replied, after a moment. “I went into the city with some of Becca’s friends from school. We rented a hotel. Things got… a little out of hand.” He ended the sentence with his signature smirk, his own little nod to the family’s knowledge of his totally-unproblematic-party-boy reputation. “You know how it goes.”

From the end of the table, Eric’s father barked a bitter laugh around a glug of red wine. “‘A little out of hand?’” He challenged. “Is that what they call waking up to a two-hundred dollar cleaning fee from the Marriott on my credit card?”

The sound of silverware clattering on ceramic had every eye turned in Connor’s direction.

_The Marriott._

The pieces fell into place in rapid succession, one after another, in a disorienting, _sickening_ cadence. He could see each moment as clear as day behind his eyes: the tense conversation on the ice rink, the angry glint in Eric’s eyes tonight, Kevin’s words to him the night they met: _You’re nicer than they are._ The caller ID on his screen from Kevin’s voicemail. The fucking gash across his cheek. 

A defensive wound. 

“What the fuck did you do?” The words were cold and flat, escaping him in a whisper before he could stop himself. 

“Connor Liam!” His mother’s scandalized voice called from beside him, but he didn’t look away from Eric, who was staring back at him with eyes narrowed in confusion. 

“What the _fuck_ did you do?” He was yelling this time, and standing, through no active decision-making of his own. Someone else had taken over his body, driving him through rage alone; stronger than the time he had stormed down a hotel hallway, stronger than what provoked him to deck Eric in the face. Suddenly everything made so much sense and no sense at all, and Connor couldn’t be held accountable for whatever was about to happen in retaliation. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Eric spat, sitting infuriatingly back in his chair, even as Connor towered over him, drawing a crowd of concerned faces around the table. 

Eric knew. He _knew_ Kevin couldn’t consent to… god, to whatever the fuck awful shit transpired in that hotel room between them last night. He _knew_ that he knew, because Connnor was the one to tell him, the morning after his birthday. And Connor had always known that the person pretending to be his friend since childhood was a lot of things, most of them unpleasant, but he never took him as a goddamn _rapist._

Something in the finality of the word, the unblinking reality in black-and-white of what he had presumably done to Kevin, severed his last thread of restraint. The world around him went red and messy. The noises he registered blended together as one – the startled shriek of his mother, the shattering of ceramic against hardwood floor, the satisfying fucking crunch of Eric’s nose under his fist. Again. And again. And again. And ag––

“Connor! Connor– Jesus, stop it, man!” The arms looping around his chest, under his arms, might have been Steve’s but he couldn’t see, and he didn’t care. He swung his fists out wildly, trying to catch another blow, but the solid body behind him yanked him backwards, out of reach from Eric’s stunned and bloodied face.

Connor stared back at him, huffing labored breaths through clenched teeth and– oh. When had he started crying? He only had a second to question the hot tears on his face before Eric was propelling himself off the ground, making a lunge for him. Connor was fucking ready for it. He yanked against the restraining hands, eager to get his hands on him again, but Mr. Davis swooped in behind Eric and held him back. 

“That’s enough!” His commanding voice stopped them, both of them breathing raggedly from opposite sides of the table now. “Steven, take him outside to cool off. Eric, upstairs. Now. Let’s go.”

He didn’t have much of a choice, being the obvious weaker of the two and semi-paralyzed from the adrenaline crash that was starting to trickle down over his fried nervous system. Connor let himself be dragged into the attached garage off the Blades’s kitchen, feeling Steve’s heavy hands on his shoulders once they came to a stop. 

“Holy shit, dude.” To his surprise, Steve was almost smiling, looking at him with a look of bewildered – if not a little concerned – amusement. “What was that about?”

Connor was _supremely_ not in the mood for this. He jerked backwards out of his grasp, swiping at both of his eyes with his shirt sleeves. His wrists and knuckles were throbbing now that sensation returned to him slowly. 

“Leave me alone,” he bit, digging his fingers into his curls. 

“Okay, but I don’t know if I should–”

“Just go!”

“It’s okay, Steve.” Connor’s mother appeared in the doorway of the garage. “I’ve got him.”

Steve straightened up, taking a step back. “Yes, ma’am. 

Connor let his palms slip down from his scalp to bury his face, his body slumping over. He let out a groan of frustration, of anger, of pain. He heard his mother cross the room, the heels of her boots clacking across the cement, but he didn’t look up. He felt something inside of him hurtling toward a breaking point, like the vibration of a glass just before it shattered. 

“Connor McKinley, what on _Earth_ has– _oof.”_

He didn’t think either of them had been expecting him to collapse into a puddle of tears in his mother’s arms at that moment, but that’s where he found himself; his arms thrown around her waist, head buried in her shoulder and sobs wracking his body like a child. 

She reciprocated without question, with only a moment’s hesitation, placing her hands over his head and pressing him toward her. “Honey.”

A particularly gruesome sob tore free from his throat on the exhale and he squeezed her tighter, all the weight he’d been carrying with him for some time bubbling up in his throat, desperate for reprieve. For escape. For someone else to hold it up off of his shoulders, if only for a moment. 

“Mom,” he cried around a quivering lip. 

“What is it, Connor? What’s going on with you?”

The invitation split him down the middle, throwing open the gates of secrecy and pain and letting it all rush out of him in a long, wordless wail. _I’m sorry, Kevin. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I can’t be stronger for you, and I’m sorry I didn’t do this sooner._

“Mom, I… I need to tell you something.”

He couldn’t hold it back any longer.

* * *

It had all happened so fast.

The series of events had been set off by a sharp slap across James’s cheek. He had resisted leaving Kevin and Chris behind, for what they all knew would be the last time, when he was ordered to go upstairs and get ready to work. His resistance had gone as far as a physical shove to the General’s chest after he’d pushed him toward the steps; the most physical rebellion Kevin had ever seen from him. There was a brief moment of pride for his friend, a hope that maybe someday he _would_ find his way out of here, with or without Kevin. 

Then the slap. 

After that, it was chaos.

Chris was a dart of movement blurring in Kevin’s periphery, propelling himself off the floor and toward the General. For a moment, some part of Kevin was genuinely impressed. He had really gone for it. He supposed he was right about one thing: there was little left to lose for them now. And Chris knew that, because his efforts were futile. The kid’s strength would have paled in comparison to the General’s on a good day, but after a week of starvation and severe mistreatment in a cold, dark basement, there was no challenge at all. 

Kevin stood frozen in the center of the room, fear seizing his muscles as Chris was easily knocked to the ground, his makeshift weapon clattering uselessly across the floor to land at Kevin’s feet. He watched helplessly as the General landed one blow after another on his battered face, knees straddling his narrow waist. Even from across the room, he could see that Chris was out cold, and sent up a silent prayer that he wasn’t about to watch someone be killed right in front of him. 

He heard the wordless scream tear out of James’s throat as he ripped at the General’s shoulders, tearing him away. The General turned back to him, staggering to his feet, and yanked James’s head back by a fistful of hair. Marcus descended the stairs at the commotion just in time for James to be thrown into his grasp. 

“Lock him upstairs.” The General swiped at a glob of blood on his lip from the one blow Chris managed to get in, spitting the rest onto the ground next to him. “Make sure he fucking stays there until after they leave.”

“No!” James cried out, kicking out against Marcus’s obedient hold. His eyes darted wildly around the room as he was dragged backwards up the stairs, locking with Kevin’s. “Kevin!”

He was still frozen solid, unable to move an inch in either of their defenses and unsure of what he would do even if he could. The image of James – the last one he may ever have – began to blur in his vision and he had to blink away the tears to keep their eye contact just a few seconds longer. _I’m sorry it has to end like this,_ he hoped he could communicate with his eyes. _I love you. Thank you._

When he was gone, pulled through the doorway of the kitchen and out of earshot, Kevin crumbled. His legs gave out from under him, folding him onto the cold ground. 

“What?” The General snapped in his direction. “Nothing from you today, princess? Feeling well-behaved all of a sudden?”

Kevin didn’t look up. His eyes, instead, trained on the sharp, jagged metal of Chris’s botched retainer on the ground beside his knee. Slowly, he slid his hand to cover it, curling his fingers around the edges where the General couldn’t see the movement. The sharp edge dug into the cut where the broken glass had been less than twenty-four hours before, but he let the pain ground him as the General sauntered toward him. 

“Should have known you’d be the first to cave,” the man taunted, coming to a stop less than a foot in front of him. Kevin’s eyes glistened with anger and terror as he stared down at the filth and grime lining his boots. “You were never one to put up much of a fight.”

Kevin’s fingers tightened around the edge of the weapon, even as tears splashed onto the dusty concrete. 

His silence must not have been the reaction the General was looking for to reinstate his dominance after letting one of them get a hit in, because after a moment he felt fingers in his hair, tilting his head back to stare up at him through bloodshot eyes. 

“Don’t worry.” The General’s smile was even more insidious with the addition of blood-smeared teeth. “I’ll be sure to tell Jack how brave his big brother was before he had to take his place.”

That was all it took. That was all it ever took to make Kevin do the thing he was most terrified of doing. And in that moment, there wasn’t an ounce of regret in his system as he reared back his borrowed weapon and thrust the sharpened end forward, just below the zipper of the pants in front of his eyes.

The General’s howl of pain cut through his throbbing head, but he fed off of the satisfying sound, twisting his hand around the weapon and yanking downward until he felt something tear. The catharsis was fucking glorious but shortlived as the cry of pain turned into a growl of anger, and the General yanked the weapon free of his pants and flattened Kevin to the ground. 

Kevin’s vision went momentarily white as the back of his head collided with the concrete, but he fought back anyway, just to earn him a swift punch to the face. 

“I hate you!” He screamed out, over and over again, a sob ripping free as the taste of iron and salt flooded his mouth. “I hate you, I fucking _hate you!_ ” 

How much was he bleeding? More than he should have been, certainly, when the General struck him again. His vision was going blurry, darkening at the edges like it did with the worst of the pills, but he was sober now. Sober and… dying? 

Was he dying? 

Large hands closed around his throat, the crushing pressure flattening his neck to the ground beneath him. The air was cut off from his lungs immediately, and his fingers came up instinctively to claw at his wrists, scraping bloody skin under his nails as his resistance gained no purchase against the hold. The black spots that had crept into the edges of his vision after his last blow to the head closed in on the center now, tunneling his vision until all he could see were the two, glaring eyes above him. A sickening realization crashed over him, that those eyes, the same ones that haunted his every day and night, awake and asleep, would be the last thing he ever saw. 

Everything went black. The only sound in the room became a distant ringing in his ears.

And then a blast so powerful he would have recoiled from the sound if his body had any life left inside of it. 

And a weight, heavy and immovable, dropped down onto his chest. He couldn’t breathe again.

And then he could. 

The weight was gone. Everything felt lighter. Fuzzier, but lighter still. 

There was something wet and sticky on his skin.

He couldn’t open his eyes.

The noise faded out again, the ringing even stronger than before, and when it trickled back, there was somebody on the ground beside him, or slightly above him, but Kevin still couldn’t open his eyes to find out who. He couldn’t decipher all the words being spoken either, but he knew they were there, fading in and out of his consciousness in muffled, fragmented pieces. At first, something in his brain, something in the low tone of the voice, the familiar scent of stale coffee and faded cigarette smoke, told him it was Marcus. But that didn’t make sense, because the words – whatever he could latch onto – were… kind? Gentle. The voice called him by his name, his _real_ name, grasped him gently by the shoulders, told him to _wake up, come on kid, don’t you fucking die on me now. We were so fucking close._

None of it made sense. 

And it couldn’t have been Marcus, because he introduced himself then to someone, someone else, as _“Special Agent Ellis… been a change in plans… ambulance to the house…”_

Kevin tried to open his eyes to see the stranger, to make sense of the confusing pieces of the conversation he was hearing, but he couldn’t move a muscle. It felt a bit like the night Dominic had drugged him and left him abandoned on the General’s couch, except this time he didn’t feel as scared. He felt oddly at peace, which… something in his mind told him was probably not a good sign. 

The man who was definitely-not-Marcus spoke again and Kevin tried hard to narrow his focus on the words. _“...a team to intercept the target… be spooked by the sirens, but we can’t wait… yes… he’s dead.”_

Was he talking about him? Was _he_ dead? Was that why everything felt so far away and quiet? But no, that didn’t make sense either. If he was dead, he wouldn’t still be in so much pain. Would he? Kevin had never been less sure what the afterlife held for him, but he felt sure it couldn’t be worse than the life he was leaving behind. That thought brought him a modicum of comfort as the noise around him – and with it, his remaining shred of consciousness – slipped further from his grasp. 

He was startled back to the surface by more hands on him, different hands. His eyes shot open that time, a gasp of air ripping into his throat. Above him was a stranger he could barely make out over the bright flare of light shining directly into his eye. A woman with a tight, black ponytail and blue hands– no, those were gloves. When his eyes snapped shut again, he realized he hadn’t been the one holding them open. 

_“Is he going to be okay?”_

_“Sir, please take a step back.”_

Kevin slipped under again. 

When awareness crept into him next, just barely, he was somewhere else. He could tell because the freezing cold of the basement was no longer a constant, numbing prickle on his skin, and there was a bright, white light beyond the eyelids he still couldn’t pry open. He was moving, too. Fast. 

_“Young male, age unknown.”_ A woman’s voice carried somewhere far above him. “BP is seventy over forty… pupils are responsive but delayed… EMTs said the patient sustained multiple blows to the head and lost flow of oxygen to the brain for an unknown period of time.” Then the voice was closer. Softer. “Hon, can you tell us your name?”

Even in his state, Kevin remembered the rules. His previous experiences had been drilled into his head too painfully not to. Be good. Lie. Don’t tell anyone your real name. Not doctors, not cops. You have to lie, and lie _well,_ or the General will... 

No. Wait. But the General is…? He’s...? No. He knows. He always knows. He always finds out. Be good. _Lie lie lie._

“Le—Leo. ‘m Leo.”

“His name is Kevin Price.” Another voice joined the mix, cutting him off from his other side, urgent, out of breath. Marcus. Not Marcus. Agent… something. Not Marcus. “He’s nineteen years old.” 

Whoever it was, Kevin had the distinct feeling that he should be afraid of them. He _was_ afraid, but he wasn’t sure why. 

“He has at least ten milligrams of lorazepam in his system as of last night. Maybe more since then, I don’t know for sure.”

“Are you his father?”

There was a pause. “I'm the one who called.” Another beat of silence. “No, I— no, I’m not his father.”

“I’m going to ask you to wait out here, sir.”

“Please, just… please, don’t let him die.”

“We’re going to do everything we can.”

Kevin didn’t hear anything after that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Even if you hated every other part of this chapter and story, at least rejoice with me in the fact that the General got stabbed in the dick with a broken retainer. ANYWAY... hi. Please love me.


End file.
